


last night they said the fire had spread

by lumberchicken



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Pandemics, rachel duncan isn't a nice person, sarah manning isn't a totally great person either, they are teenagers, they're not clones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:39:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2292206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumberchicken/pseuds/lumberchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel and Sarah and the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. so if i'm a liar and you're a thief

**Author's Note:**

> HEY YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE
> 
> (hint: it's post-apocalypse/pandemic stories)
> 
> i'm preeetty sure this will be three chapters total, and the other two should be longer than this one. i mostly just wanted to set things up here.

When Rachel Duncan is eight years old, her life changes.  
  
There are things that are hazy in her memory: the ride in the ambulance, the voices of the doctors and nurses who examine her parents, the room with the couch and the water cooler they take her to at the hospital. What isn’t hazy at all: the gurgling breaths coming from her parents’ chests, the blood pooling under their fingernails, her father’s voice when he murmured, “My poor, poor Rachel.”  
  
After that, Dr. Aldous Leekie comes to take her to DYAD, and her world shrinks to a single wing in a single building. She learns words like _asymptomatic carrier_ and no one ever tells her that her parents are dead, but she figures it out after a few weeks when nobody comes to take her home. She’s not allowed out of her room except for once a day, where for forty minutes she’s allowed into a special courtyard with a playground and a big patch of grass.  
  
She’s the first—and for a long time, only—asymptomatic Cruso carrier, and everyone is always telling her what a great thing it is. Every time they take her blood, they tell her what a hero she’s being. For DYAD, for everyone. Her room is huge, even bigger than the one she’d had at home, and she gets practically anything she wants. No one’s allowed to come into her room without a suit and mask, but she gets a laptop and can video conference with Dr. Leekie, which is almost as good as talking face-to-face. Dr. Leekie cares about Rachel—he’s invested in her, he says, he cares about her like she’s his own daughter. He brings her new books every week, and sometimes they play chess over video conference.  
  
It’s nearly three years before she gets a roommate. Beth Childs is around her age, a stoic girl with her long hair tied up in a ponytail. She doesn’t cry, but she asks about her parents all the time, badgering anyone in a uniform until Rachel has simply had enough. She tries to think back, to remember whether she asked about her own parents as much, but she just… can’t, anymore. She feels like an entirely different person.  
  
“They’re dead,” she tells Beth one night, not even looking up from her book. She sort of tries to sound empathetic, but she thinks she mostly just sounds bored. Really, she just wants Beth to _shut up_ about them.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Dead. They’re dead. So are mine.”  
  
“What?” Beth repeats again, her voice high, reedy, like she’s close to tears.  
  
“You’ll get used to it,” Rachel says. “I did. Honestly.” The last word manages to be both a promise and a  statement of exasperation.  
  
After that, Beth stops talking, her jaw clenched so tightly that Rachel can practically hear her teeth cracking. The two of them never fight, exactly, but Rachel has come to understand a fundamental difference between the two of them: she is strong, Beth is weak. Where her walls are iron, Beth’s are wooden, cracked and splintered and barely holding up. In other words, Beth just isn’t worth her time, and Rachel stops offering it.  
  
As months pass, more arrive at DYAD. Their similarities are noted: they were all born female. They were all born within a year of each other. But the overlapping patterns are outweighed by the differences among them: born in different countries, different continents. Some were rich, some poor, but most of their families seemed to fall somewhere along the lines of the middle class—and Helena grew up in a convent in Ukraine and is all but feral with her peroxide bleached hair and twitching fingers.  
  
It’s impossible to fit them all in one room, but the purpose of putting Beth and Rachel together was for companionship, not out of necessity. A few months after they turn fourteen, Beth requests to be moved to a different room with a high-strung girl named Alison.  
  
“I hope you’re very happy together,” Rachel says with a tight smirk as Beth is escorted out, not entirely sure what she means by it but knowing by the uncomfortable flush that spreads across the other girl’s face that she’s hit a nerve.  
  
They try giving her a few different roommates; Katja, who spills red dye in the bathroom; Jennifer, who cries herself to sleep every night; Cosima, who never shuts up and almost sets her own bed on fire with a cold pack and some salt (somehow—Rachel never asks about or takes an interest in her experiments, aside from this one, for obvious reasons). After that, Rachel files a personal request with Dr. Leekie: no more roommates. Ever.  
  
 _Your family is dead, yes,_ she wants to spit into each new arrival’s tear-streaked face. _Your old life is over. Learn to adapt before it ruins you. I did._  
  
One by one, she finds a reason to hate all of them, these teenagers trespassing in her tiny, closed-off world. Using up the dwindling supplies and taking up the attention of the staff. Naive. Stupid. Fragile. Afraid.  
  


+++  
  


When Rachel Duncan is sixteen years old, her life changes.  
  
That’s the year Dr. Leekie stops coming in. The year the books stop, the year their laptops don’t connect to the outside world anymore, the year the lights start to flicker like strobes more often than not. The year she walks out of the en suite and finds Sarah Manning standing in her room, teeth bared and a bruise blooming on one cheek.  
  
For a second, she’s too shocked to move. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“Nice to meet you too,” Sarah says, her voice gruff but the words rolling out effortlessly on her thick, low-class accent. “Rachel Duncan, yeah? My name’s Sarah.”  
  
“I don’t care what your name is,” Rachel says mildly. “I want you out.”  
  
“Yeah?” Sarah doesn’t seem offended. She nods. “I want out, too.”  
  
She can’t help the incredulous laugh that comes out of her. “Not out of DYAD. Out of my bedroom.”  
  
“Look, princess, I don’t plan on stayin’ very long, so get over yourself.” And just like that, Sarah is flopping down onto the previously unoccupied bed with her boots still on.  
  
With her boots still on.  
  
“Those are filthy,” Rachel blurts before she can stop herself.  
  
“Piss off already,” Sarah groans, voice muffled in the pillow. “I’ve been on a plane for ten hours, give me a fuckin’ break.”  
  
“Excuse me.” Beth was silent and sulky, Katja was _German_ , Cosima was obnoxious and chatty. None of them ever told her to piss off.  
  
“I said piss off! I’ll be out of your hair in a few days. It’ll be like I was never even here.”  
  
That evening, Rachel waits by her door until she sees someone walk by outside. Then she presses the button on the intercom. “Excuse me. I’d like to arrange a video conference with Dr. Leekie, or to have him come in, if that’s possible.” She doesn’t smile, and it’s not a question.  
  
The person—a guard, maybe, she’s not sure and can’t tell under the mask—stares at her for what seems like a long time. “Dr. Leekie’s dead,” he says finally, incredulous. “He got sick. Everyone outside is getting sick. Everyone except you freaks.”  
  
After that day, Rachel watches Sarah watching everyone else. She’s always on the lookout for holes in the fence, for something she can exploit to get herself out and away. She fights everybody, the guards who walk her down the hall to medical so she can have her blood drawn, the nurses who are drawing the blood, the doctors who inevitably arrive to sedate her or help strap her down. Then she’s dragged back to the room—to _Rachel’s_ room—where she becomes Rachel’s problem. It’s infuriating. _Sarah_ is infuriating.  
  
One afternoon Sarah is dragged inside, not sedated, but limping. Blood drips from a split lip, from a cut along her hairline, onto the floor. The white floor. Rachel is up instantly and throwing an entire roll of paper towels at her before the door’s even clicked shut behind her.  
  
Sarah catches it and limps over to the bathroom, filling the sink with water and abandoning the paper towels in favor of a washcloth, wetting it and running it over her bloody face. Rachel follows and stands near the door, unwilling to cross the threshold and involve herself any further. “What have you done now?” she asks in a low voice, hoping to convey her intense aggravation and mild disappointment in the single sentence.  
  
“I was kickin’ the guy who was trying to take my blood,” Sarah tells her between applications of the washcloth. “And he wanted to strap me down to the table, so I kicked out real hard and ripped his suit open.”  
  
“You—what?” She averts her eyes as Sarah starts to pull her shirt over her head and feel along her left side, but Rachel Duncan is not the type of person to stare demurely at the floor. She glances back up, up the smooth white of Sarah's side, past the reddish bruise on her ribs, past the delicate angle of her neck and the brown tumble of her hair, back to her face, her bared teeth and narrowed eyes.  
  
“He saw and just went off. I think he cracked a bloody rib, shite…” she murmurs, wincing.  
  
“Sarah,” Rachel says, half-unbelieving (only half, because Sarah is a wildcard, Sarah doesn’t care about anyone but herself—she’s like Rachel, in a way, but twisted). “You do realize that if he’s been exposed, he will die.”  
  
“Yeah?” Sarah asks. “And what do you think’s gonna happen to us, locked up in here like bloody animals? Donating all our blood to science?”  
  
“You _are_ an animal,” Rachel snaps. “Honestly, look at you.”  
  
Sarah pushes past her, back into the bedroom, her skin sweaty against Rachel’s where it touches. “I think you like to,” she hisses, hot and quick, and then she’s gone.


	2. at least we both know where the other one sleeps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "what is this feeling" from wicked plays over and over and over again

It’s 8:30 when the lights go out for the third time that day. They flicker, on-off-on-off, and then everything shuts down with a low whine. The silence afterward, the absence of the electric hum she’s been hearing for half her life, is strange—but the power has gone out before. Lately, it’s been cutting out at least once a day, sometimes for as long as a few hours at a time. She sits back and waits, blinking into the darkness and wishing, not for the first time, that her room had windows.  
  
Correction: that _their_ room had windows.  
  
“Fuck’s sake, not again,” Sarah groans, kicking something off her bed. Rachel hears it clatter into a corner and can’t help smirking at the thought of her crawling around in the dark looking for it later, feeling around on the floor like an idiot.  
  
“Good luck finding whatever that was,” she says, clicking her laptop shut and placing it on the bedside table. She likes the way her voice sounds in the quiet—smooth and in control and bored with the very idea of talking to Sarah Manning. “I hope it wasn’t expensive.”  
  
“This is the third bloody time today!” Sarah says, affronted. Actually, she sounds more offended that Rachel’s _not_ offended. “Honestly, talk about prison…”  
  
“It’s as much of a prison as you make it,” she says, pulling back her blanket and climbing underneath.  
  
Sarah must hear her, because she says, “Wait, you’re not seriously goin’ to bed, are you? It’s only half eight. What are you, ninety years old?”  
  
“Well, I could go to sleep, or I could sit here having this conversation with you,” Rachel says, settling down, “and that would require a level of personal interest in you that I simply don’t have. Goodnight.”  
  
To her surprise, Sarah laughs. “You’re a cold bitch, aren’t you? But then, I heard you’ve lived here a long time. Leekie’s pet, that’s what they call you. That true?”  
  
She doesn’t answer, but her hands tighten around the blanket and she’s already scolding herself for starting this conversation in the first place. She knows Sarah likes to goad people, after all. If she’s not kicking at the guards and nurses, she’s prying for information she can twist and throw back in their faces.  
  
“Guess they can’t call you that anymore, huh,” Sarah continues. “You sad he’s dead?”  
  
“No. Not really.”  
  
“Seriously?”  
  
“Our relationship was purely professional,” she says. “He often said he felt like I was his own daughter, but it’s hard to form a bond with someone who only sees you in person four times a year. The others probably saw him as much as I did. I was just the first.”  
  
“What about your mum and dad?” Sarah asks. “You miss them?”  
  
“That’s really none of your business,” Rachel says, forcing her voice to be cold, cold, cold. “I can barely remember my parents. My life here has been sufficient.”  
  
Sarah’s silent for a minute, thinking it over. “That’s fucked,” she says finally.  
  
“I haven’t exactly heard you speak about your parents, either,” Rachel says, silently adding, _Thankfully_. The last thing she needs is another roommate who simply won’t let the subject drop, who spends every day making Rachel wonder whether she’s supposed to feel ashamed for not feeling the same way, whether she should spend the rest of her life grieving over two people she barely knew.  
  
“No parents,” Sarah admits after several seconds, her voice quiet. “Just my foster mother and foster brother. They—well, whatever, I guess they’re…”  
  
“Mm,” Rachel says, adopting the tone of false sympathy she’s used with each of her previous roommates. “It does get easier, I promise you.”  
  
Sarah’s quiet for a minute—trying not to cry, Rachel assumes, or thinking over what she’s said. But when she finally speaks, there are no tears in her voice, just an anger that makes Rachel think of clashing fists and black boots and a bloody grin. “Don’t give me that shit. I wasn’t askin’ for your sympathy and I know you don’t feel it anyway, you bloody android bitch.”  
  
Rachel isn’t offended. “If that’s how you feel,” she says. In any case, it makes things easier for her if she doesn’t have to pretend that she feels sad about Sarah’s poor, dead foster family.  
  
“That’s how I feel,” Sarah agrees. “But saying that shit about your own parents? Your life here’s been _sufficient_? That’s fucked up. I hope you know that.”  
  
Her mouth opens, closes. She frowns. In the end, she can only turn onto her side, facing away from the other girl. “It was,” she says with an air of finality, “a long time ago.”  
  


+++  
  


At some point much later, she wakes to a crash, to muffled yelling, and she’s still blinking sleep from her eyes and attempting to figure out what’s happening when gloved hands pull her roughly from her bed and into a standing position, her arms behind her back. Her knees buckle.  
  
“On your feet,” a muffled voice says, and when she doesn’t immediately hold her own weight, they repeat themselves, this time shouting it. “On your feet!”  
  
There’s a dim light in the room now—the generator must be running—but she has no idea what time it is or who’s in the room with her. All she can see are biohazard suits, five of them, and two have Sarah pinned facedown to her bed, where she’s thrashing and trying to throw them off. Ah. That would be the muffled yelling, then.  
  
“Excuse me,” she begins, but they’re already talking over her. _Ignoring_ her.  
  
“This one won’t be any trouble,” the guard who has her by the arms is saying, “but make sure you’ve got that one cuffed before we move.”  
  
“Should we sedate her?” the one pressing Sarah’s face into the mattress asks.  
  
“It shouldn’t be necessary if she’s restrained, but make sure she’s not wearing shoes. Little bitch likes to kick.”  
  
While the conversation goes on—where the van is waiting, whether or not Sarah should be allowed out of the cuffs once they’re in the van—she watches as the other girl’s struggles get weaker and less deliberate, until it becomes obvious, to Rachel at least, that she’s not trying to hurt anybody anymore. She’s just fighting to breathe.  
  
“Excuse me,” she repeats in a louder voice, attempting to look important in her pajamas and bare feet. “If you kill one of us in transit, how much trouble will you be in, I wonder.”  
  
One of the guards pinning Sarah turns to look at her. In the dim light, with his face mask on, she can’t see the expression on his face, but his voice is as cold as Rachel’s. “I should kill her,” he says evenly, and even knowing how much Sarah’s been going out of her way to cause them problems, it sends a thrill of shock and anger running down her spine. “In fact, I wouldn’t bat an eye if they ordered us to get rid of each and every one of you little freaks.”  
  
“It sounds like you’ve been ordered to move us, not to kill us,” she says, keeping her voice even. Collected. As if she’s essential, important, the way she always used to feel when they told her what a great service she was doing for DYAD, for the world. Not the way she feels right now, with her arms wrenched behind her back like she’s some kind of criminal, like she and Sarah Manning are in on this together, both of them equally guilty.  
  
There’s a pause that lasts only a few seconds. Now that Sarah’s not yelling into the mattress anymore, the silence seems to draw itself out, elasticized.  
  
“Lay off,” the guard holding her arms says finally. “Make sure she’s cuffed and we’ll meet you out there.”  
  
With that, he and another guard lead Rachel out of the room, leaving Sarah alone with the remaining three. They take her down the hall and past the elevator, to the stairwell.  
  
“Stairs only,” one sighs. “They don’t trust the power right now.”  
  
“Tell me where we’re being taken,” she says. As if she gives a shit about the _stairs_ , honestly.  
  
“Another facility. There’s a doctor there—Dr. Nealon. He wants to do some more extensive testing.”  
  
“And what does that entail?”  
  
The guard scoffs. “Hell if I know. I’m just following orders here.”  
  
She stops asking questions. These men aren’t in charge, aren’t even close. Not for the first time, she wishes she could contact Dr. Leekie. He, at least, used to project some sense of authority.  
  
When they reach the lobby, she’s convinced she can remember it from her arrival years before, but she’s given no time to stop and look around. They lead her through the double doors at the front of the building and suddenly she’s in the _world_ again, not just sitting on a patch of grass in the courtyard at the center of the building but _out_ , crossing what seems like an endless black street toward an equally black van, feeling a breeze against her face for the first time in years, seeing the sun as it rises up ahead of her.  
  
It’s so mesmerizing that she forgets to blink until she’s been deposited in the back of the van. Tinted windows, an uncomfortable bench, and a small box with two bottles of water, two napkins, and two bags of mini pretzels. “In case you get hungry on the way,” the guard tells her, and she can hear the wink in his voice, how funny he finds this. These girls, saving the world with their blood, being treated like criminals.  
  
A few minutes later, Sarah joins her in the back of the van, handcuffed and sulking, her face wet with angry tears, a fresh cut bleeding on her lower lip. Rachel looks away, swallowing, disgusted—with whom, she’s not sure at first. The guards, she decides after a moment, and their completely unprofessional behavior. She and Sarah are, after all, helping all of them, even if Sarah’s been less than cooperative.  
  
The two of them don’t speak as the doors slam shut behind them and the van rolls away from the curb. Eventually, Rachel flicks her eyes back in Sarah’s direction, checking to see if she’s still crying, and is relieved to find that she’s not. She’s sitting and staring out the van’s back window, narrowing her eyes every time they pass a directional sign.  
  
“Are you all right?” she asks after a minute, immediately regretting the question. _Stupid._  
  
“Highway…” Sarah mutters, pretending to ignore her.  
  
“Your face is bleeding,” she adds. “You should really take care of that.”  
  
In response, Sarah lifts her shoulders and rattles the handcuffs. “What the hell do you want me to do about it?”  
  
Rachel sighs, grabbing a water bottle and a napkin from the box in the corner. “Hold still,” she orders, scooting forward on the bench as she wets the napkin.  
  
“Like hell,” Sarah snaps, jerking her head back. “Mind your own business. I don’t want you touchin’ me.”  
  
“ _Hold still_ ,” she repeats, grabbing Sarah’s jaw in her hand. “I can’t abide a mess. I’m not going to sit next to you while you’ve got blood smeared all over your face.”  
  
“It’s not that bad, for Christ’s sake,” Sarah groans, but she doesn’t move. Rachel can feel her pulse beating under her fingers, can feel the heat of her skin. She wipes the blood from Sarah’s chin and dabs at her lip with the wet napkin, making the other girl hiss softly. “’S cold.”  
  
“I think this box has been sitting here for a while,” she says, finishing up with the napkin. “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”  
  
“You’re so bloody weird,” Sarah sighs, shifting away from her, closer to the wall of the van. “Can’t handle a little blood, but you’ve got no problem with being kidnapped?”  
  
“We’re not being kidnapped,” Rachel says, feeling like she’s talking to a five year old, “we’re being _transferred_. Temporarily. If you weren’t always throwing tantrums, you might have been given this information, too, you know.”  
  
“We’ve already _been_ kidnapped, and it wasn’t today, you bint,” Sarah says, rolling her eyes. “God, just shut up and let me concentrate, yeah?”  
  
“Concentrate?” She curls her lip. “On what?”  
  
Sarah doesn’t answer her, just goes back to staring out the window, shifting occasionally to make herself more comfortable. Feeling rebuked, resenting Sarah all the more for it, Rachel pretends that the silence was her idea. They sit in the back of the van for hours, moving toward a place they’ve never been. Every once in a while, Rachel looks at Sarah out of the corner of her eye, at her lips, at the small cut drying there.  
  


+++  
  


It’s some kind of hospital. At least, she’s almost certain that it is one. They’re taken straight to their new room, but the fluorescent lighting and disinfectant smell bring her straight back to the last hospital she was in, to the room with the couch and the water cooler, to the last time she saw her parents.  
  
There are more guards, she’s sure, but they keep well back, using none of the force that DYAD’s guards did. An orderly escorts them down the halls, a man named Brian who’s wearing gloves and a surgical mask. She doesn’t see a single person in a biohazard suit as they make their way down the hallways and toward their new living quarters. The entire operation seems very low budget to Rachel, almost slapped together, and she’s sure Sarah is thrilled, already planning some kind of mayhem.  
  
The room they’re taken to is smaller than the one she’s used to, but the windows almost make up for it. They’re huge, almost floor-to-ceiling, and she can’t help herself from walking over and looking out, almost hypnotized by the parking lot below them, the sunlight spinning off the few cars in the lot, by the seemingly endless forest beyond that.  
  
“Reinforced glass,” the orderly tells her, sounding cheerful and slightly awkward, like he’s not sure how much he should say. “Ain’t nobody getting out that way.”  
  
“Oh, fuck,” Sarah says with a roll of her eyes, “there go all my plans to bail out the window and hope I land on a car or some shite like that.”  
  
Rachel shoots her an aggravated look as the orderly blinks at her, unsure how to respond. Finally he mumbles, “There’s a change of clothes for both of you in the drawers. Someone will be by later with dinner.”  
  
“Thank you, Brian,” Rachel says, biting back a sigh. “You’re dismissed.”  
  
“Dr. Nealon is sure excited to meet you girls,” he adds on his way to the door. Then, wilting under Rachel’s stare, he hurries out, the door beeping as it locks behind him.  
  
Sarah flops backwards onto the bed she’s claimed, testing out the mattress. “ _Thank you, Brian_ ,” she mocks in an eerie facsimile of Rachel’s own voice. “Suck his dick, why don’t you.”  
  
Rachel pauses, puts a hand to her temple. She believes she’s getting a migraine and she knows exactly whose fault it is. Any semblance of the concern she’d felt for Sarah earlier has disappeared entirely. _You are impossible_ , she wants to spit out, to scream. _It’s entirely your fault that we’re here_. But she knows they’re being watched and she wants—she _needs_ —to be seen as calm, in control. Safe. No danger here. No need for the reinforced windows and locked door. Take her back to DYAD and let Sarah keep it all for herself.  
  
“You are not helping our situation, Sarah,” she says finally.  
  
Sarah makes a disgusted noise, a humorless laugh in the back of her throat, and stops talking to her. She gets up from the bed and starts to circle the room repeatedly, like a caged animal. She runs her hands along the walls, stares up at the air vent near the ceiling. Each time she passes the door, she slows to study the keypad. As she passes the beds, she yanks the steel supports, testing their strength.  
  
Rachel watches her from the edge of her own bed, bored, missing her laptop and her chess set and her books. What is she meant to do with her time here? How is she supposed to better herself with no stimulation aside from a wall-mounted television set and an idiotic roommate? Absurd.  
  
“You look completely ridiculous,” she observes after what seems like Sarah’s fiftieth circuit of the room.  
  
The other girl flashes her a quick smile. It’s not friendly, but it is confident. “You’ll thank me for this soon,” is all she says.  
  


+++  
  


For three days, they stay locked in the room with only the TV and each other for company. Their clothes are taken away and replaced with dark blue hospital scrubs. One of the orderlies promises to bring in some books, but hasn’t made good on her word yet, and Rachel gets only blank stares when she asks about her laptop. There are no menus delivered to them, no option to request something different to eat. Meals are delivered at 8 AM, noon, and 6 PM every day, everything looking like it comes straight out of a can.  
  
They spend most of the time watching TV and ignoring each other, and by the time Dr. Nealon shows his face, Rachel is half-ready to listen to Sarah’s blathering about how they’ve been kidnapped and held against their will. But only half.  
  
When Nealon comes to their room, he doesn’t wear a mask, just a pair of gloves. He offers each of them a handshake, which Rachel accepts and which Sarah ignores. He tells them how good it is to finally meet them, how much he’s looked forward to it, and how much he anticipates getting down to work with them in the next few days.  
  
Rachel is pleasant, accommodating, asking when they’ll begin testing and if there’s anything she can do to help the process along. She thinks Dr. Nealon likes her, though it’s hard to tell, because he looks at both of them with the same slimy smile and wet, pink eyes. Sarah stands against the wall opposite, staring at him with her arms crossed, her eyebrows narrowed.  
  
As he’s leaving their room, he starts to cough, a thick, wet sound. They can hear it even after the door has shut and locked behind him.  
  
“He’s sick,” Sarah says, anger and—Rachel could swear—fear in her voice.  
  
“No,” she says. “He wouldn’t be working here if he was sick. They’ve got procedures, Sarah, to avoid that.”  
  
“Did you hear him? He’s coughin’ his lungs out!” She runs a hand through her hair, starts pacing back and forth in front of the TV. “He’s got it. Pretty soon everyone’ll have it. Fuck, we’ve gotta get out of here…”  
  
Rachel crosses her arms and tries to watch the TV around Sarah’s head. “Don’t be an idiot.”  
  
“Listen,” Sarah says, still pacing. “I know you don’t like me, and that’s fine. You know I think you’re a bitch anyway. We don’t need to _like_ each other.”  
  
“Splendid.”  
  
“But we’re gonna need each other when we get out of here.”  
  
Rachel scoffs, “I certainly don’t need you. And I’m not leaving here until the tests are finished and they take us back to DYAD. Or until they take me back, at least. God knows what they’ll end up doing with _you_.”  
  
Since Sarah won’t stop blocking the TV, she turns and heads for the bathroom, the only place she can go to get away from her roommate and this inane conversation. Sarah grabs her arm before she takes more than three steps. “Wait!”  
  
“Don’t _touch_ me,” she says, aghast, trying to yank her arm out of Sarah’s grip. She only half-succeeds and now Sarah’s holding her by the wrist, her fingers curled tight.  
  
“Don’t you get it?” she says. “You think this was your idea, but they’ve—they’ve got nothing left to do, Rachel, they’re desperate! Can’t you see that? Do you even know what the world is like anymore? How could you, they’ve had you locked up like a bloody lab rat half your life!”  
  
“Don’t touch me,” Rachel repeats, making each word clear and distinct. Making her voice cold.  
  
“Please,” Sarah says, “please just listen to me. These people aren’t on your side. We’ve gotta work together, we’re all we’ve got now.”  
  
She pulls out of Sarah’s grip and walks into the bathroom, calm, cold. She locks the door behind her and stares at her own face in the mirror until it means nothing to her. Until her heart stops racing, until she can barely remember what Sarah’s fingers felt like on her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops this is gonna be four parts :)


	3. so let's end this tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> draco malfoy voice: "i didn't know you could read."
> 
> p.s. absolutely nothing in this story is scientifically accurate, oops.

She and Sarah all but ignore each other for the next week, which is fine with Rachel. She imagines that keeping her mouth shut is more difficult for Sarah, who has less experience with being quiet for so long, who is used to using the silent treatment like she’d use a gun, quick and flashy and then finished until the next time she decides she needs it.  
  
Except now, it’s like she’s decided that there’s no convincing Rachel, and that by extension, Rachel is no longer worth her time. At all. It’s _infuriating_ , because that’s exactly how Rachel is trying to treat Sarah, and when the two of them are playing the exact same game in the exact same way, there’s simply no enjoyment in it. Just a sulky silence.  
  
They’ve given up on watching TV because it’s practically impossible to find a station that isn’t cut through with static or a blinking “this channel is unavailable. please contact your cable provider” or just a blank, black screen. Sarah still flips through the channels once or twice a day, trying to pick up a news station, but she never looks like she’s expecting much, and she’s never disappointed. When she’s not checking the TV, they read the small pile of books and old magazines that have been delivered to their room.  
  
It’s slow, torturous, and Rachel is considering—only in a vague way, of course—breaking her silence and attempting to talk to Sarah. Even listening to her ranting about DYAD and Dr. Nealon and the rest of it would be preferable to sifting boredly through the same old issue of Seventeen again.  
  
She’s considering it, but then the nurse shows up and she’s relieved to find that it becomes a nonissue.  
  
“Rachel Duncan,” the woman says from behind her mask, eyes flitting between the two of them—she has no idea who’s who, and it makes Rachel’s stomach heat up with angry disgust—“you’re up.”  
  
“Where are you taking her?” Sarah asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken in at least a day, and her voice is scratchy, but she eyes the woman with blatant suspicion and the nurse, flustered, takes a step back toward the door. Rachel slides off her bed and follows, smoothing down her scrubs with one hand.  
  
“Bloodwork,” is what the nurse finally decides on, and Sarah sighs audibly.  
  
“You’ve been keepin’ us locked up in here for two weeks and all you’re doing is _bloodwork_. Yeah, gotcha.”  
  
The nurse doesn’t reply, just ushers Rachel from the room and shuts the door behind them. They walk down the hall and around two corners before stopping in front of an exam room. The building seems very empty, but she supposes it’s possible that there is an entire wing filled with people that she hasn’t seen. Or that the labs are full of scientists and doctors all busy working on a cure, a vaccine, something.  
  
She has her weight, temperature and blood pressure taken and then the nurse leaves her alone in the room. “Dr. Nealon will be by in a few minutes,” she says as she goes, and it surprises Rachel. Dr. Nealon is there after all. She momentarily forgets that she and Sarah aren’t speaking, imagines herself gloating to Sarah about how wrong she’d been all this time.  
  
When Dr. Nealon comes into the room a minute later and places a small stack of files on the countertop across from her, all thoughts of gloating leave her immediately. She has to bite down to stop herself from gasping. He’s easily lost twenty pounds in the week since she last saw him, and the pink skin around his eyes is wet, slimy, oozing like a burn. She can see dark spots of blood under his fingernails even through his gloves, and she forces herself to sit still, to breathe evenly.  
  
 _If he touches me, I’ll scream._  
  
But of course he does touch her, places a hand on her arm in greeting, and she doesn’t let herself make a sound, much less shriek and jerk away from the hot, heavy weight of his hand.  
  
“Good to see you again, Rachel,” he says, and she can hear the bubbling sound of his breathing. “This won’t take long. We’re going to take some blood and then inject you with a—” He breaks off to cough, his entire body shuddering with the force of it, and when he straightens up again Rachel can swear she sees flecks of blood bleeding through his white surgical mask. She flicks her eyes away from him, to the countertop and the files, to her own hands, which are steady and not at all shaking, to the floor. Anywhere but Dr. Nealon.  
  
She stares at the floor, waiting for him to continue, but he seems to have forgotten what he was saying, instead turning to the door and saying in a choked voice, “Let me just finish setting up. I’ll be back shortly.”  
  
“Of course,” Rachel murmurs. As soon as the door is shut behind him, she’s wiping at the skin of her arm with an almost fanatic disgust. He _touched_ her. Even through the gloves she could feel the heat of him, of his sickness, of his _death_.  
  
Just like her parents. Her father’s hand had been just as hot, just as wet with sweat and the stink of coppery blood had been everywhere, it was in the house, in the ambulance, in the hospital and it made her want to scream, like it’s making her want to scream now. Except then she was eight and now she is sixteen, she is practically an adult, and she is not going to make a fool of herself. She’s going to let them take her blood and do whatever else they need to do, and she’s going to be the cure, and she’s going to prove to them all how much better she is than the others. Than Sarah Manning.  
  
She needs to do something. Anything to distract herself from the awful feeling of Dr. Nealon’s hand on her arm. She gets up from her chair and makes her way to the counter, looking down at the files he’d set there.  
  
 _Duncan, Rachel_ , the one on top says, and underneath, _Manning, Sarah_. But there are more files underneath— _Fournier, Danielle_ and _Zingler, Janika_. She flips Danielle’s file open, but most of the pages are statistics and lab results that mean nothing to her. Then, on the last page: “Subject was administered dose of CV461 on 9/4/—.” Almost a month ago.  
  
She hears someone approaching the door and almost throws the file back onto the pile in her haste to get back to her chair. She needn’t have worried, though, because Dr. Nealon returns with all the speed and grace of a man much, much older than his sixty-odd years. He’s followed by the same nurse who walked Rachel to the exam room, and she’s carrying both blood draw supplies and a small vial of some kind of clear liquid.  
  
 _CV463_ , it reads.  
  
“What is this?” she asks as the nurse takes her blood, her eyes unable to leave that tiny vial. Her throat is dry and she resists the urge to ask for a drink. “Dr. Nealon? I’d like to know what this is, please.”  
  
He clears his throat, the sound a sickening grinding in his throat that makes her think, absurdly, of wet meat hitting a wall. “This is something we’ve been working on,” he tells her. “Not an antiviral or a vaccine, but a virucide. Now, there’s absolutely no danger, Rachel, no need to worry.”  
  
 _Liar_ , she thinks. And she lets them do it anyway.  
  
She doesn’t let herself wince as the needle slips in, though the burning sensation at the entry site quickly spreads to her entire left shoulder. In any case, it’s an ordeal she only needs to suffer through for a few seconds. Then, the nurse is covering the injection site with some kind of gel and bandaging the spot with easy efficiency.  
  
Before she’s led back to her room, Dr. Nealon steeples his bleeding fingers and tells her, “Good luck, Rachel.”  
  
Sarah’s on her bed, pretending to read, when Rachel walks back in. She looks up with raised eyebrows, questioning, but Rachel only raises hers in return and says archly, “I didn’t know you could read.” The burning sensation is moving from her shoulder to the rest of her arm, and she has to stop herself from rubbing at it.  
  
Sarah waits until the door has shut and locked behind her before she says, “Well? What’d they do to you?”  
  
“Nothing,” she says, her voice distant and quiet, and she forces herself to engage. To spar—that’s what Sarah wants. A fight. Some proof. The most she manages is a terse, “Bloodwork, like they said. I’m fine.” She wonders if Danielle Fournier is in a room identical to this one somewhere, her arm as aching and hot as Rachel’s is. No. That’s stupid. Whatever happened to Danielle happened almost a month ago.  
  
Sarah stares at her for several seconds, appraising, but seems to realize she’ll get nowhere by pushing things. “Bullshit,” she mutters, going back to her book.  
  
“Think what you want,” Rachel hears herself say. “I think I’m going to lie down for a while.”  
  
“Suit yourself, Duncan,” is the last thing she hears.  
  


+++  
  


At some point in the night, she wakes up leaning over the toilet, retching, her skin burning. The aching heat from her arm is leaking into the rest of her body with each beat of her pulse, into her heart, into her head. Someone’s hand is on her back, cool, rubbing circles between her shoulder blades.  
  
 _It’s my mother_ , she thinks, at the same time expecting to turn and see Dr. Nealon and his bloody fingers, or Dr. Leekie, or an anonymous blank facemask. All of these images seem to hit her at the same time, superimposed on each other, and she moans, closing her eyes.  
  
“Hey, you’re all right,” a voice murmurs, a voice that’s as cool and soothing as the hand on her back. “You’ve got a fever, that’s all.”  
  
Sarah. For a moment she feels like she could cry. Not Nealon, not Leekie, not her mother. Just Sarah.  
  
The hand leaves her and she immediately craves the touch again, the cool skin on her feverish back. She hears the sound of running water and then Sarah is holding out a paper cup. “Drink this, okay?”  
  
She looks up at it, her stomach rolling at the thought of putting something into her body, even water. She tries to push the cup away, but her hand doesn’t even connect before she’s dropping it again, exhausted.  
  
Sarah holds the cup to her lips, her other hand supporting the back of her neck. “Small sips, yeah?” she says, patient, and Rachel swallows. “You’ll get dehydrated if you don’t drink water.” Sarah’s voice is as comforting to her ears as the liquid is to her throat, and she sits, sipping, listening to the other girl speak, feeling her hand on the back of her neck.  
  
Once the water is gone and she’s sure she won’t get sick again, she forces her eyes open and tries to stand. Sarah pulls her up by the waist, sliding an arm around her, and Rachel shivers at the touch. She can’t remember the last time she was so close to another person.  
  
“Here,” Sarah is saying, “let’s get you back to bed and I’ll get you some more water and…”  
  
“The doctor,” she says, almost to herself, “we’ve got to call…”  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah agrees, “yeah, I know. I’ve been waiting, haven’t seen anyone come by, but I’m keepin’ an eye out, don’t worry.”  
  
She lets Sarah half carry her back to bed, the sheets cool and dry and wonderful, and her eyes are already closed by the time she hears Sarah placing another cup of water on the bedside table, say in a voice that sound a million miles away, “Call if you need anything, yeah?”  
  
Hours later, she opens her eyes and sees that the sun is rising out of a pinkorange cloudscape outside the windows. Her head is aching, aching, and she can hear Sarah yelling at somebody outside the door. “What the hell is wrong with you people,” Sarah is saying, “you can’t just lock us in here and throw up your hands! You did this!”  
  
The sound is like daggers in her ears, the sunrise is acid behind her eyes. It’s all too much. She closes her eyes. Too much.  
  


+++  
  


She wakes up a day later—really wakes up—and blinks at the ceiling, disoriented. The sun is out, that’s her first thought. Last she can really remember, it was evening. The night before? Or… the night before that?  
  
After a minute, she props herself up on her elbows and looks around. The room is different, somehow, slightly off, and it takes her another few seconds before she realizes that she’s not in her own bed. She’s in Sarah’s, somehow. There are empty water bottles on the table next to her, a packet of aspirin that looks like it was ripped open with someone’s teeth. She runs a hand through her hair, smoothing the strands back into some semblance of their normal bob. She needs a shower and some breakfast—lunch, maybe?  
  
Just as she’s struggling into a sitting position, Sarah comes out of the bathroom, still drying her hair with a towel. It takes her a few moments to realize that Rachel is awake, but when she does, a strange tension seems to drain out of her.  
  
“Holy shit, Duncan,” she says, unable to entirely hide the relief in her voice. She throws the towel onto the unoccupied bed—Rachel’s bed. “I was gettin’ kinda worried there.”  
  
“Why am I in your bed?” is all she can think to ask. Her voice is slightly hoarse, scratchy.  
  
“You… kinda got sick all over yours,” Sarah says. “They came by and replaced the sheets and all, but I’d already let you take my bed and you were asleep, so.”  
  
She sets her jaw, humiliated, and averts her eyes as she swings into a sitting position. “Are you finished in the bathroom? I’d like to take a shower.”  
  
Sarah watches her, frowning. “Yeah,” she says after a couple seconds, “go ahead. You’ll be okay in there?”  
  
She stands, worried that her legs will give out on her. They don’t, of course. She doesn’t let them. “I’ll be fine,” she says, forcing her voice back to its usual clipped tone. “Has lunch been served yet? I think I should eat.”  
  
“Not yet,” Sarah says, her voice strangely uncertain. “It’s late today. Lucky you.”  
  
“Excellent,” she breathes, making her way past the other girl and into the bathroom.  
  
“Rachel, what hap—” Sarah starts, but she shuts the bathroom door in her face and punches in the lock.  
  
An hour later, her hair is wet, but it’s clean. The bathroom is filled with steam, and she imagines all of the poison that made her so sick drifting into the air like vapor. She gives her teeth and extra long brushing, cleans her face, and looks up into the mirror. Nothing to see but vague colors and a human shape. She frowns and wipes away the steam. Better. Her reflection looks normal—it’s hard to imagine she could have been so sick only hours before.  
  
Except she knows it was true, can still remember the way her legs kicked at the thin sheet, trying to get some air, the way her head ached, the pain pulsing through her arm and down her side. _Danielle Fournier_ , she thinks suddenly. _Subject was administered_ —  
  
She throws the door open and stands in the doorway, hands at her sides. “Sarah,” she calls in a choked voice.  
  
Sarah is in the process of stripping her bed, throwing the sheets and mattress cover onto the floor, but she looks over with furrowed eyebrows. “You okay? You feeling bad again?”  
  
“It isn’t that.”  
  
“What’s up, then?”  
  
“I think—” She shakes her head, starts over. “I saw something in Dr. Nealon’s office the other day. Files. At least two other girls are here.”  
  
“Shit,” Sarah muses, abandoning the laundry and walking closer. “I haven’t heard anyone mention other girls, have you?”  
  
She shakes her head again. “They gave something to them, a vaccine or… virucide,” she says, less certain now. “The same thing I got, but different numbers.”  
  
“Numbers,” Sarah says thoughtfully. “Like different formulas or something?”  
  
“… I’m not sure,” she admits. “I didn’t have much time to look.”  
  
“What the hell were you doin’ snooping around like that, anyway?” Sarah asks. “That’s like shit I’d do, not you.”  
  
She swallows, unable to articulate the crawling disgust she had felt at the sight of Dr. Nealon, the desperate way she’d needed to distract herself. “I thought there might be something you’d find useful,” she says. A lie, but it makes Sarah smile in a way she hasn’t seen in weeks, and it sends an odd shiver of pleasure up her spine.  
  


+++  
  


Nobody comes with lunch. Dinner is served an hour late, and the orderly who brings their trays insists that he can’t take the dirty bedsheets with him.  
  
“I’m not a fuckin’ laundry service,” he snaps, and Sarah yells back, “Yeah, well, I can’t exactly walk down to the laundromat, can I, you dumb tit?” which has approximately zero effect on him, judging from the speed at which he slams and locks the door shut behind him.  
  
“Fuck,” Sarah breathes, arms crossed. Then she crosses the room and sits on her bare mattress, eating her dinner in stony silence. Rachel watches her for a bit, then directs her attention to her own dinner, not particularly caring for Sarah’s sulky attitude. Someone will be along.  
  
It’s only later, when it’s nearly midnight and nobody has come to take their dinner trays away, much less to replace the dirty sheets, that Rachel sees how this could be a problem. She watches the other girl pick up the dirty blanket off the floor and throw it onto the mattress.  
  
“Fuck it,” she’s muttering to herself. “Who cares anymore.”  
  
“Don’t be such a child,” Rachel sighs, and then, before she’s even registered the thought, she adds, “We can share for one night.”  
  
Sarah stares at her, disbelieving. “Seriously?”  
  
She clears her throat. “It _is_ my fault that your blankets are dirty. I suppose you could take my bed and I could use the other.” Even as she says it, she knows that she’s never going to crawl back under her dirty blankets and lie on her sweat-stained bare mattress.  
  
For a minute, she thinks Sarah is going to laugh at her, to say “No way in hell,” to say “I’d rather sleep on a bare mattress than share a bed with you, Duncan,” but instead she sighs and shrugs and mutters, “I am so tired, who bloody cares…” and crosses the room to climb into bed next to Rachel.  
  
Lying there next to her, almost touching, feeling the heat from her body, Rachel stares at the ceiling. She starts counting Sarah’s breaths, listening as they begin to even out in sleep. She really must have been exhausted. Probably hadn’t slept the night before. Probably because she was up taking care of Rachel and trying to get somebody to come in and look at her.  
  
 _These people aren’t on your side, Rachel._ And for the first time, she really believes it.  
  
“Sarah,” she says in the dark.  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“I… I’d like to leave with you. When you go.”  
  
Sarah is quiet for several seconds. “What?”  
  
“I _said_ ,” she repeats, “when you go, I want to go. I know you’ve been planning to leave. I want to—”  
  
“I heard what you said,” Sarah says, propping herself up on one elbow. There’s an amusement in her voice that she can’t—won’t—cover up. “I’m just waitin’ for you to come to your senses and keep refusing to admit I’m right. That’s your thing, yeah? Professional lab rat Rachel Duncan.”  
  
She takes a deep breath in through her nose. “I never said you were right,” she says, beginning to raise her voice, beginning to force herself into the clinical coldness she’s always relied on. “I said that I don’t want to stay here. There is a difference, Sarah.”  
  
“Oh, shut up,” Sarah groans, bending her head, and before Rachel can think to say anything in response, they’re kissing.   
  
It’s not the kind of kiss she’d always imagined late at night in her bed, delivered by an anonymous boy with an anonymous face, with perfectly smooth skin and no scent or taste. Sarah is rough, every movement spontaneous and not thought, simply _done_ , and their teeth click together, and she can taste toothpaste and feel Sarah’s hand on her shoulder, sweaty and warm through the scrubs they’re both wearing as pajamas.  
  
For a moment she almost pulls away, almost pushes Sarah off, but in order to do that she’d have to move forward, move closer, so she simply closes her eyes and kisses her back. It’s not an apology, it’s not “you were right,” but it’s the closest thing she can bring herself to give, and Sarah’s fingers tangle in her hair, seem to say, _I know, I get it_.  
  
When Sarah finally pulls back, they’re both breathing hard, the sound harsh in the darkness.  
  
“Shit,” Sarah breathes, at the same time Rachel clears her throat and says, “You could do a better job.”  
  
“You bloody kiddin’ me?” Sarah snaps. “Says the girl who’s never kissed anyone before in her life!”  
  
Rachel smooths down her shirt, fixes her hair, and doesn’t bother responding.  
  
“So fuckin’ bossy,” Sarah mutters, rolling onto her back. “See if I take you anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... am going to stop saying how many chapters this will be in the end, because every time I do that, I end up adding another chapter. I WILL JUST SAY that I know where this fic is going and how it will end.


	4. now that i know that you stole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rachel has some issues.

Food stops arriving with any sense of regularity. Rachel tabulates it all with practiced ease, keeping a silent record of their hungry days and nights, and says nothing to indicate that she’s worried.  
  
Late breakfast. No lunch. Dinner on time.  
  
No breakfast. No lunch. Late dinner.  
  
Breakfast on time. No lunch. No dinner.  
  
One day, they get nothing. Just a long, empty day with nothing to satisfy them but water from the bathroom sink. “Drink lots,” Sarah says that evening before bed. “That’ll help a little.”  
  
 _And how would you know?_ Rachel almost snaps, then stops herself, deciding that maybe she doesn’t want to hear the answer. Instead, she pours herself another paper cup of water before climbing into her bed, turning her back to the other girl and the windows and the thought of starving to death in this room, an animal locked in a cage.  
  
Sarah hasn’t kissed her since the night they shared the bed. Instead she paces the floor, looking more and more desperate with each passing day. It’s not a good look for her. Rachel prefers the lazy confidence, the bright flashes of anger, the eyes that looked alive. Not this girl with the chapped lips and nervous, twitching fingers.  
  
Rachel lies in bed and thinks about the way it felt to share the bed, to have a solid, warm weight beside her all night long. Sarah’s lips, soft but unhesitant, and her teeth when they’d caught Rachel’s own lip in a bite that was just the slightest bit too rough. She lies awake and thinks of food, and she thinks of Sarah. It’s desperate. Stupid. But she’s too hungry for both to care.  
  
She thinks Sarah was all talk. There’s no plan. That’s why she lies curled up with her back facing Rachel now. Why she doesn’t lash out whenever someone opens the door to deliver their food, but spends so much of her time pacing and staring at the door.  
  
 _At least it will be both of us_ , she catches herself thinking one night when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t believe she could live with herself if Sarah Manning managed to get out and she didn’t.   
  
She thinks she would die of contempt instead of hunger.  
  


+++  
  


It’s early in the morning when the beeping of the door lock wakes her. She opens her eyes, squinting in the pale dawn light, and sees Sarah standing by the door, her hands clenched into fists. There’s a look on her face that Rachel hasn’t seen in a while, a look she can read immediately. It’s a look that says many things, but the most important one is _danger_.  
  
“It’s about time,” Rachel murmurs, knowing Sarah can’t hear her, but needing to voice her approval anyway.  
  
“Sarah Manning?” she hears a hoarse voice say as the door swings open. No breakfast trays, just a stooped figure, a woman leaning against the doorframe. Sarah falters, her shoulders hunching up in surprise.  
  
“We’re taking you… to exam room four,” the woman says, stifling a cough. “Good to see you’re already awake.”  
  
“I, uh…” Sarah begins, and Rachel can’t stop herself from sitting up. _No_ , she wants to scream, _no, you idiot, what do you think you’re doing?_  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah says after a moment, “okay.”  
  
She doesn’t even look at Rachel as she leaves.  
  


+++  
  


Hours go by and Sarah isn’t coming back and Rachel’s stomach is eating itself. She can’t tell if it’s from hunger or hate.  
  
She rips the blankets off both beds and screams into the mattress. She throws the useless TV remote at the wall until it breaks into pieces and leaves a dark bruise in the paint. She wants to pull absolutely everything in this room apart, to claw at the walls until she sees her own blood, to find Sarah and scratch, and hit, and _hurt_. But Sarah isn’t coming back, so she hits herself instead.  
  
She hits herself for every stupid decision she’s made in the past few weeks. Stupid for trusting Sarah. Stupid for telling her about the files in Dr. Nealon’s office. Stupid for kissing and letting herself be kissed. Stupid for thinking about it again and again and again. Stupid for lying there and watching Sarah leave the room, _leave the room_ , and letting the door lock behind her.  
  
She thinks about starving, and about Sarah. Sarah, who’s either escaped or strapped down on a table somewhere, but who’s certainly not coming back. She places a trembling hand on her own throat and imagines finding her, killing her, making her pay. But she doesn’t. She can’t.  
  
In the end, she falls asleep on the bare mattress with bruises on her face and hands.  
  


+++  
  


Someone nudges her shoulder. She ignores it.  
  
“Oi,” Sarah hisses, low and impatient. “Get up.”  
  
She opens her eyes and it’s morning, again. Maybe closer to noon. She’s exhausted and her stomach feels nonexistent, shrunken past the point of pain. Sarah is staring at her like she’s insane, and she feels insane, lying on this mattress surrounded by ripped blankets and broken pieces of remote.  
  
“You came back,” she says, and her voice is as dead as her stomach. “I didn’t think you were going to.”  
  
“Jesus bloody Christ,” is all Sarah mutters. There’s no trace of amusement or affection in her voice. She glances over her shoulder, to the door, and Rachel follows her gaze. The door is hanging open.  
  
“How,” she says, but she knows how even before Sarah holds out a stolen passcard. Of course.  
  
“Get up,” Sarah says again, and nudges her harder, almost a shove. “Get _up_ , we’ve gotta _go_. I don’t think anyone’s lookin’ for us but I can’t be sure and we need supplies and—shit, just come on.”  
  
They stumble out into the hallway in their scrubs and bare feet, Sarah holding onto Rachel’s arm with a vice grip, like she’s pulling along a stubborn toddler. After a minute, when the dreamlike quality of it all starts to fade, she wrenches her arm out of Sarah’s grip.  
  
“Don’t touch me. I can walk on my own.”  
  
Sarah relinquishes her grip with a sigh. For the first time, Rachel sees the blood smeared on her shirt.  
  
“Is that yours?”  
  
Sarah hesitates. “It’s not mine.”  
  
They walk on in silence. The fluorescent lights don’t offer them any comfort. They stay side by side, hands almost brushing, both on the lookout for strangers in masks, for the shriek of an alarm.  
  
At the end of one corridor they almost stumble upon a body lying curled up just around the corner. One gloved hand is gripping the wall, like they were trying to pull themselves up into a sitting position when they died. There’s dried blood on the floor around their head. Sarah makes a low, sick noise in her throat and hurries past, skirting the body with a shudder, but Rachel stops to stare at it for several seconds, noting the glassy eyes and parted lips, the beard stubble, the clothes stained with blood.  
  
 _You would have let us starve_ , she thinks, and nudges the body with a foot—almost a kick. It flops over onto its back, limp. _No one will bury you, and you deserve it. You’ll rot here in this building like we would have_. She feels a small smile creeping onto her face.  
  
“What the fuck are you _doing_ ,” Sarah suddenly snaps from twenty feet ahead, and she looks up with her smile fading.  
  
“Nothing.”  
  


+++  
  


The two of them stand in the parking lot with the sun beating down on their upturned faces. The air is warm, springlike, but Rachel knows winter is on its way. The nights will be getting cold already. This moment—being outside, truly outside, with no one monitoring her—feels so huge and so small at the same time. Like she should fall to her knees and shrug her shoulders.  
  
Next to her, Sarah breathes in deeply, letting her eyes drift shut. In the sunlight her skin looks paper thin and pale, almost blue. Rachel knows she must look the same—tired, hungry, dirty, sick.  
  
But they’re out. That’s something.  
  
“Now what,” she hears herself say out loud, unaware she’s even thinking it until the words are on her lips.  
  
Sarah opens her eyes and smiles. It’s brief, only a flash, but it’s a flash of confidence and anger and all the things Rachel’s missed lately.  
  
“Now,” she says, beginning to walk, “we move.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, sorry, sorry that this is so short. i really meant for it to be much longer, but the tone shift wasn't working, so i decided to keep this chapter short and more self-contained.
> 
> p.s. in case you are wondering: did sarah kill somebody or several somebodies to get out of the hospital?
> 
> answer: no. sarah manning is literally incapable of killing anyone. however, she did hit them really hard and then check for a pulse for .5 seconds before deciding that they were probably dead enough.


	5. yeah, you stole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rachel still has issues, news at 11.

They walk for almost an hour before Rachel’s stomach seems to revive itself. It gives a painful twinge that she can feel all the way down to her bones, and her walk stutters to a stop while she presses a hand to her abdomen, as if she can soothe the pain just by covering it with her palm. She didn’t know being hungry could _hurt_ , but that’s what this is, as sharp as a punch to the gut.  
  
Running away was a mistake, she realizes suddenly. A terrible mistake, but not one she can’t undo. It wouldn’t be difficult to turn around, to walk back to the building and to her room, to wait there for someone to come and transfer her to another facility—because someone _will_ be coming. They have to be.  
  
Sarah realizes she’s walking alone and turns to look back at her. “What’s with you?”  
  
“I can’t do this,” Rachel says, taking a step in the wrong direction. “I need to go back.”  
  
“Go back?” Sarah sounds confused. “We can’t go back.”  
  
Rachel doesn’t bother to explain herself any further. She turns on her heel and starts walking back the way they came, toward the hospital. Sarah hurries after her, catches up in seconds, and stands in front of her like a sentinel, blocking her path. “We can’t go back,” she repeats breathlessly, her voice cracking on the last word.  
  
“You don’t have to come with me,” Rachel says, thinking that she sounds quite reasonable. “In fact, it would be better if you didn’t.” _Better for me_ , she adds silently. Yes, better for the authorities to think of Sarah as the problem (always as the problem), while Rachel—loyal, patient Rachel—is still waiting in her room, willing to help.  
  
“Rachel, there’s nothing to go back _to_ ,” Sarah insists, grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a rough shake. “You saw what it’s like back there. Everyone in the building’s dead or dying and you’d end up starving to death in there! For nothing!”  
  
“Someone will be coming for us,” Rachel says over her, voice edging into thinly veiled panic. “Someone will come and continue the research, the testing. All of it.”  
  
Sarah looks at her for what seems like a very long time. In the end, she simply mutters “Jesus Christ,” and drops her hands from Rachel’s shoulders. At first she thinks Sarah is letting her go, but the other girl holds up a hand and continues, “All right, hold on, just… give me a minute, yeah? Let’s sit down and eat something.”  
  
She swallows, her throat dry. She doesn’t want to be here anymore—to be out in the world, which already seems impossibly huge and unbearably empty. But for once, her stomach overrules her mind, and she allows, grudgingly, Sarah to push her down into a sitting position on the road. She watches as Sarah drops the bag she’s had slung over one shoulder. She already knows what’s inside—cans from the hospital kitchen and blankets from an empty room. Provisions for the road.  
  
 _Provisions_. The word makes her want to laugh out loud. As if a few cans of food and two blankets will be enough to live on.  
  
Sarah pulls out two cans of soup and one with sliced peaches. “Dessert,” she mutters with a weak smile.  
  
“How will we open them?” Rachel asks dully, and rolls her eyes when Sarah produces a knife from the bag. Of course Sarah is too rebellious for a can opener. And of course she hasn’t brought any other utensils, which means they have to eat with their hands. Like _animals_. She’s too hungry to comment, although she hopes that Sarah catches her disapproving expression and understands what it means.  
  
After they’ve finished their soup—cold, unappetizing, but her stomach already feels a little better for it—and opened the can of peaches, Sarah starts to talk. She keeps her eyes on the road, on her hands, on the food, anywhere but on Rachel.  
  
“I think they’d been sick for a while, before we even got there,” she says. “That’s why they were so lax with the gloves and masks and everything. Whatever they were doing to us was just some last ditch effort.”  
  
Rachel says nothing. She pulls out a peach slice with her fingers and puts it in her mouth, so sweet it makes her eyes water. Sarah is waiting for her to reply, but Rachel knows that if she stays quiet, Sarah will keep talking anyway. Of course she will.  
  
“Look,” Sarah says after a minute of silence, still staring down at the road. “The other girls who’d been in the building are dead. No one’s coming, Rachel. If there are other places working on a cure, they don’t know we’re alive or how to get to us.”  
  
She sets the can of peaches down on the road. Her fingers are sticky and her stomach, unused to the sickly sweet fruit, suddenly feels overly full. Nauseous. “You know this,” she says. “You’re certain.”  
  
Sarah nods. “I looked for them before I came to get you. I needed to be sure.”  
  
“And they…” Rachel swallows the sick feeling in her throat, takes a deep breath, forces herself to stay calm. “They didn’t inject you with…”  
  
“No.” Sarah finally looks up at her. “I grabbed something, I don’t even remember what, and I hit her. The nurse.”  
  
Rachel pauses, worried she might be sick. “Is she dead?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “I didn’t stick around to check.”  
  
She makes a humming noise of acknowledgment, not sure what to say. She certainly can’t condone what Sarah has done, but if what she says is true—and Rachel is inclined to believer her—she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.  
  
“I hit hard,” Sarah adds quietly. “And I ran and found something heavier and I kept hitting. Anyone I saw, anyone who tried to stop me.” Her eyes are bright, her mouth set, challenging Rachel. Daring her to argue, to blame.  
  
Rachel thinks back to the corpse they passed in the hall and the pool of blood around its head. The way Sarah had skirted around the body, afraid to get too close. She swallows again, and once she’s sure she won’t throw up, says, “I suppose we would have died. If you hadn’t.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah sighs, and she can hear the truth of it in that single word. “We would have.”  
  


+++  
  


When the sun starts to set, Sarah finds a spot off the road where the trees are spread out enough for both of them to lie down. She pulls the two hospital blankets out of the now half-empty food bag and tosses one to Rachel. They sit across from each other, quiet, waiting for the dark.  
  
As the sun disappears, the air gets cold. Rachel feels her fingers and toes start to go numb and doesn’t say a word. She waits for Sarah to come to her, because she knows Sarah will, and there’s no point in asking for something she’s going to get anyway. Sure enough, a few minutes later Sarah mutters that it’s too bloody cold.  
  
“Here, put your blanket down on the ground. Then we’ll put mine on top of us. The ground’s colder than I thought…”  
  
Rachel does as she’s told, and then Sarah’s sitting next to her, wrapping her own blanket around the two of them. It does help, a bit, not to be sitting directly on the cold grass.  
  
At first they’re sitting next to each other, and then they’re lying curled up together. It seems to happen all at once, and Rachel can’t remember how. She wonders if Sarah can sleep like this, surrounded by darkness and trees and probably animals. Maybe animals who are not acclimated to people anymore.  
  
“Sarah,” she whispers sharply as she hears what sounds like a footstep just outside of their tiny clearing.  
  
“What?” Sarah groans, already half-asleep.  
  
Rachel waits. When the noise doesn’t repeat itself, she starts to feel like an idiot. Sarah is still waiting for her to say something, so she whispers the first inane thing that comes to her mind. “Have you ever done this before? Slept outside like this?”  
  
Sarah yawns. “A few times,” she says. After that, she’s quiet for so long that Rachel starts to worry she’s fallen asleep. Then she speaks again, and her voice is strange, sleepy and disconnected, like someone describing a story they’ve only heard secondhand. “Before DYAD found me, things were already getting bad. Whole cities were emptying out ‘cause people were dying or trying to get to places they’d be safe. Except there’s no place to be safe from shit like this. We—my foster mother and brother and me—camped out a few times when she thought it was too dangerous to stay in the city.”  
  
“I see.”  
  
“We were gonna try and find a place to set up permanently,” Sarah says. “Somewhere quiet.”  
  
“Do you know where?” Rachel wonders if Sarah will try to get back to that place, someday. If she’ll drag Rachel along with her.  
  
“Like she would’ve told me.” Sarah tries to laugh, but it comes out sounding brittle, angry. “And anyway, you know how that turned out.”  
  
Rachel swallows a yawn. “I suppose you have your choice of places to go now.”  
  
Sarah rolls onto her back, sounding thoughtful. “It’d be nice to set up on a beach somewhere, yeah? Somewhere warm. Lots of food…”  
  
“Mm,” Rachel murmurs. It does sound nice. They both fall into tired silence, and she starts to drift off, feeling safer knowing Sarah is still awake beside her.  
  
“We’ve gotta get more supplies,” she hears the other girl saying quietly, more to herself than to Rachel. “Tomorrow. Lots of stuff to get.”  
  


+++  
  


They reach the town proper the next morning, after finishing the rest of their food (more cold soup, with pineapple chunks to wash the bad taste down) and about an hour of walking, during which they see nobody, hear nobody, and Rachel starts to understand that the things Sarah said the night before were not an exaggeration.  
  
“Suburb,” Sarah says, a sneer in her voice, as they walk down the main street, which is littered with trash and seems like it hasn’t been looked after in weeks. The town doesn’t seem to be very big, and it’s certainly not the city center Rachel was expecting after leaving the hospital, but she supposes that any place that may have supplies is better than nothing.  
  
They walk along the main street in silence until Sarah, convinced that the area is empty, or empty enough, clears her throat, like she thinks she’s a general about to make some kind of life-altering decision. “Right,” she says. “Our first priority’s water and clothes. The grocery store might be totally picked clean, but we need to at least check.”  
  
“And clothes?” Rachel asks, eager to get out of the scrubs they’ve been forced to wear for weeks.  
  
Sarah shrugs. “It’s a bloody suburban town. We’ll pass a place.”  
  
“You certainly seem confident,” Rachel observes, just a bit sarcastic.  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah says, walking ahead of her and looking over her shoulder with a wry smile, “but that’s what you like about me, isn’t it?”  
  
Rachel rolls her eyes and doesn’t bother answering.  
  
They find a shopping center a few blocks down the road, a typical suburban enclave with a grocery store and a McDonald’s, as well as several other buildings. Rachel doesn’t recognize the names, but why would she? The only brand names she’s seen are the ones she’s been given—her laptop back at DYAD, the clothes that arrived at her door with the tags already removed. The only stores she knows of are the ones she used to see ads for on the TV.  
  
They walk to the grocery store first. Sarah’s smile fades as they approach the building and see that the display windows and automatic doors are smashed. “Shite,” she mutters, crossing her arms and staring at the broken glass. “Looted.”  
  
“There will be other places to find food,” Rachel says, more for her own benefit than for Sarah’s.  
  
“We’ve still gotta check this one.” Sarah gives her a sidelong look. “Or you do, anyway.”  
  
“What do you mean by that?” she asks, already guessing the answer and not liking it.  
  
“It means you’re on food and water duty while I start collecting the rest of the shit we’ll need. Make sure you check the entire store, yeah? Grab anything you think we can use and bring it up to the doors here.”  
  
Offended and not really understanding why, Rachel crosses her arms and asks, “Couldn’t you use my help with the other supplies as well?”  
  
Sarah gives her a long, expressionless look. “I think you’d distract me, actually,” she says, her voice just serious enough to make Rachel’s face heat up in confusion. Is it meant to be an insult or a come on? Both? Neither?  
  
“I see,” she begins, but Sarah is already heading off toward the next building, calling, “Be sure to cover the entire store!” over her shoulder.  
  
She sighs and steps gingerly over the glass, into the store.  
  


+++  
  


Two hours later she emerges, blinking in the sunlight, and sits next to her pile of pilfered food. It’s not all that much, considering the amount of time she spent searching, but it’s better than the absolutely nothing she’d expected to find inside.   
  
Sarah is making her way back as well, she sees, with one large pack on her back and another held out in front of her. Rachel knows she could meet Sarah halfway and take the other pack, but honestly she’s still feeling a little bitter about being forced to check the entire grocery store, so she just sits and watches Sarah make her slow way back.  
  
“Oh, good,” Sarah says, slightly breathless, as she drops the packs near Rachel’s feet. “You found something.”  
  
“So did you, I see.”  
  
“Check it out,” she says, unzipping one of the packs. “Sleeping bags, waterproof matches, protein bars… The sports store had barely been touched and it had a big camping section. The idiots who were livin’ here skipped right over it. Oh, and I got these water filtration things… They were like $130 each, but I think we can afford it, yeah?” Sarah grins, showing her teeth, and Rachel can’t help but smile back.  
  
“You didn’t happen to find any non-hospital-regulation clothing, did you?” she asks, and Sarah nods, unzipping the second pack.  
  
“I tried to find shit you’d like. Typical rich bitch stuff, but, y’know, layers. It’s gonna get cold soon.”  
  
Rachel doesn’t take the bait. Honestly, she’s happy to wear anything that isn’t scrubs.  
  
“Oh, and I got some bourbon from the liquor store,” Sarah adds, still pulling clothes out of the pack. “In case we get bored later.”  
  
“Sarah!” Rachel tries not to sound scandalized. Sarah just laughs.  
  


+++  
  


That night, settled on a grassy area off the highway, they light a fire and break open the bourbon. Sarah makes a face every time she takes a drink, but she pretends the taste doesn’t bother her.  
  
“It’d be better with ice,” is all she says when Rachel raises an eyebrow.  
  
Rachel, for her part, doesn’t try to hide the fact that she doesn’t like the bourbon. She sips at it enough to feel warm and buzzed and slightly sleepy, but she has no interest in getting _drunk_. She’s not going to fall over or laugh at jokes that aren’t funny or otherwise make a fool of herself. Not in front of Sarah Manning.  
  
After a while, when the fire starts to burn lower, Sarah moves closer to Rachel. She can smell the alcohol on her, see the lazy smile that crosses her face when she notices Rachel watching her.  
  
“What are you doing?” Rachel asks.  
  
“I’m just cold,” Sarah murmurs, leaning closer. She buries her face against Rachel’s neck and Rachel freezes, fighting back a shiver, unsure at first whether Sarah is trying to kiss her or simply trying to burrow into her for warmth. It’s probably kissing, she decides after a second, when Sarah doesn’t stop, and then the other girl’s tongue darts out and traces the big vein in her neck and oh, it’s definitely kissing.  
  
She closes her eyes and leans her head back and feels Sarah slide a hand under her jacket, under her shirt, resting a palm against the slope of her ribs.  
  
“Have you,” Rachel starts, and then loses track of her thoughts as Sarah’s hand starts moving lower. Sarah’s not cold, she’s _hot_ , her lips are fire on Rachel’s neck and her hand is fire on Rachel’s stomach.  
  
“Hmm?” Sarah hums, the vibration sinking into her skin like a pleasant shiver.  
  
She doesn’t answer at first, the fire and the bourbon and Sarah’s hand leaving her preoccupied, but finally she blinks and sucks in a breath and finishes her thought. “Have you ever done this with a girl before?”  
  
Sarah laughs, breathless and slightly mean, against her throat. “Have you ever done this with _anyone_?” she says, and Rachel can _feel_ the smirk, the curve of Sarah’s lips still pressed against her skin.  
  
 _Don’t_ , a small voice inside her pleads, _don’t, just let her keep going, don’t_ —  
  
She pushes Sarah away, rougher than she means to, holding her by the shoulders. “Don’t.”  
  
Sarah looks at her, confused, her eyes bright in the firelight. “Don’t what?”  
  
“Don’t laugh at me.” She can feel saliva on her throat, cold now without Sarah’s lips, and wipes it away with one hand.  
  
Sarah blinks once, twice, her cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t,” she says in a low, almost chastened voice, and then, when Rachel doesn’t respond, she insists, “Rachel, I’m not.”  
  
Rachel says in a voice so low it’s almost a hiss, “I’m not just some idiot you get to laugh at, Sarah. If that’s what you’re looking for, go find someone else. Someone else to find you food and let you make fun of them.”  
  
“Rachel,” Sarah starts again, leaning back on her heels and running a hand through her hair, “come on, it was just a bloody _joke_ , yeah? We’re tired and cold and—it’s _true_ , isn’t it? I mean, you—”  
  
She thinks it would be humiliating if she shrieked and kicked their empty food cans across the campsite, so she takes a deep breath instead. “I’m sure I know more than all the boys you’ve been with.”  
  
“Shit, is that what this is about?”  
  
Rachel presses her lips together and doesn’t answer.  
  
“You know what,” Sarah mutters, getting to her feet and walking off with a bit of a stagger, her legs stiff from the cold and the bourbon, “fuck this. You’re freakin’ out for no bloody reason and I don’t need to deal with this shit right now. I’m worried about more important shit than your fucked up sexual identity crisis, all right? Christ…”  
  
“Where are you going?” Rachel asks, squinting into the darkness, listening to the crunch of leaves as Sarah stomps further away. “ _Sarah_.”  
  
“What the fuck do you care?” she hears Sarah mutter.  
  
She swallows and eases herself down into her sleeping bag, waiting until she can’t hear Sarah walking anymore. She’s not sure what time it is, how long the night will last, where they are on a map. Whether Sarah will come back.  
  
Sarah will come back. She whispers it, silent, her lips moving in the dark. Sarah won’t leave all her supplies behind. Sarah will come back. Sarah will come.  
  
There’s a low, throbbing need in her. She pictures the drowsy anger in Sarah’s eyes, the way her lips had parted, red and hot, against her throat. The flush in her cheeks as she’d pulled away. Rough, almost careless, she slips a hand down the front of her pants and touches herself. Moves, slow at first, thinking of Sarah’s lips on her neck, her breasts, between her legs. Faster, picturing the look in Sarah’s eyes as she’d gone, wounded and angry and alive.  
  
She comes thinking of Sarah’s voice as she’d snapped, “What the fuck do you care?”  
  


+++  
  


When she wakes up, the sky is still dark. The fire is low, almost burnt out, mostly embers now. Sarah is sitting beside it, staring into the flames with a sort of sleepy, drugged fascination. When she sees Rachel looking at her, she blinks and rubs at one eye.  
  
“Can I come in?”  
  
It takes Rachel a moment to realize that Sarah means into her sleeping bag, with her. Like they’d slept the night before, under the same blanket. “Mm,” she sighs, half-asleep. Sarah slips in beside her, shaking, and Rachel turns to face her. “You’re cold.”  
  
“I just got back. I was stupid for going off like that.”  
  
“Well, I’m not going to disagree.”  
  
Sarah smiles, her teeth flashing white in the dark. “I knew you’d say that, you bitch.”  
  
They lie together in silence, waiting as Sarah’s shivering ebbs away. “You’re right,” Sarah says finally. “What you asked me, you were right. I’ve never… with a girl. Before.”  
  
Rachel says nothing.  
  
“I only mean—it’s fine if you don’t want… if you want to stop, or…”  
  
“Sarah,” she sighs, “you know that isn’t what I want.”  
  
“Actually, no,” Sarah says, “you make it hard to know what you’re thinkin’ a lot of the time. When you’re not glaring, I mean.”  
  
“I’m not going to change the way I behave for you, or anyone else,” she says.  
  
Sarah shrugs. “I’m not either.”  
  
“That could be a problem,” Rachel says, and Sarah laughs.  
  
“Could be,” she says.


	6. from the cradles they were rocked in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sARAH, YOU IDIOT

“I’ve been thinking,” Sarah says, seemingly out of nowhere, two days later. “Maybe we should get off the highway. Find a cabin and crash there for a few days.”  
  
Rachel imagines the two of them walking down a backroad studded with potholes and weeds, attempting to break into a cabin, and promptly getting shot or attacked by hunting dogs. “Really,” she says, drawing the word out in an effort to seem nonchalant. “You think that’s wise?”  
  
Sarah only shrugs, falling silent again. She’s been like this all morning—mostly quiet, with occasionally bursts of energetic planning. Rachel doesn’t mind the silence, but the planning is harder to accept.  
  
Still, she figures a break couldn’t exactly hurt either of them. Their pace has slowed over the past day, and she doesn’t think Sarah’s been sleeping much, judging from how pale and tired she looks today. Rachel is sure she doesn’t look much better herself. Still, it’s odd for the suggestion to be coming from Sarah, who until now has been determinedly heading in the same general direction for days now. She hasn’t said so, but Rachel assumes she’s aiming for the coast, for the beach she mentioned. Which she supposes is fine for a start. She would like to see the ocean again.  
  
She’s about to shrug and admit that a break would be all right with her, but Sarah speaks up again before she can open her mouth. “Forget it. It’s just the sun. It’s givin’ me a headache. I thought it might be better to stick to backroads for a couple days, but… probably wouldn’t make much difference.”  
  
Rachel hasn’t noticed the sun being particularly strong, and she lets her breath out all at once, not quite a laugh. “If I haven’t said anything, you know it can’t be _that_ bad.”  
  
Sarah laughs quietly. “Shit,” she says, “you’re right. Nice to see you’re gettin’ kinda self-aware, though.”  
  
Rachel rolls her eyes and ignores the bait. “If you find a suitable place, I wouldn’t mind resting for a day or two,” she says. After all, it isn’t as if they’re on a deadline.  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah says, picking up the pace again. “I’ll keep an eye out.”  
  
An hour or so later, they stop for lunch, sitting on the shoulder and eating cans of cold ravioli. Rachel never would have thought it, but the food doesn’t bother her as much as it used to. Within the span of several days, her body has learned not to complain—that it needs the food to survive, that it should be grateful for anything she gives it. And she’s learned not to think too hard about any of the particular flavors or textures that come out of a can.  
  
Sarah pushes her half eaten lunch across the road to her. “Want the rest of this?”  
  
“You don’t?” she asks, suspicious. “Is there something wrong with it?”  
  
“Don’t be stupid. I’m not hungry,” Sarah mutters. “I think I might puke if I eat any more.”  
  
Rachel looks at her, frowning, and takes in the other girl’s pallor, the circles under her eyes. “You really should be getting more sleep,” she says finally, accepting the extra food.  
  
She expects Sarah to make a joke—to flirt with her, even—but she just sighs and waves a hand, listlessly. “Yeah, I know, it’s just… It’s not like we’re alone. Someone’s gotta keep an eye out.”  
  
“What?” She pauses with the can halfway to her mouth. “But we _are_ alone. We haven’t seen a single person since—since.” She doesn’t need to finish her sentence.  
  
“Well, yeah, but not really,” Sarah says. “We’ve been lucky, that’s all. There’ll be people… hiding out, or maybe who’ve just been lucky and haven’t gotten sick yet.”  
  
For some reason, she feels like she’s been lied to. “You said people can’t hide from this,” she says. “You said—”  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah says. “ _Generally_. But if you think we’re the only two people left, like, on earth, or in this country, even, you’re bloody crazy.”  
  
Rachel sits, silent, forcing her expression to stay neutral.  
  
“And also,” Sarah continues, “isolation does weird shit to people’s heads, so if we do run into anyone, who knows.”  
  
She can’t stop herself from arguing. Mostly it’s because this is the longest conversation she’s had with Sarah since they woke up today, but also because she’s tired of listening to Sarah talk about the world as if she’s some kind of expert. Really, she’s starting to think that Sarah just pretends better than most people. “And I guess you would know all about isolation and human psychology,” she says.  
  
Sarah’s lip quirks upward. “Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with you, haven’t I, Lab Rat?”  
  
The worst thing about Sarah, she decides, is that half the time she can’t figure out if she’s joking, flirting with her, insulting her, or all three.  


+++  


At some point in the early afternoon, Sarah trips over her own feet and stumbles to her knees on the road. Rachel turns to watch her as she gets up, frowning. She manages to get back on her feet, but sways and comes dangerously close to falling against the guardrail. Her face suddenly looks paler than ever, almost gray, and the circles under her eyes are so dark they look more like bruises.  
  
Rachel imagines Sarah fainting and cracking her head open on the road, and the mental image of herself left to deal with the aftermath sends her springing forward to grab her by the jacket and keep her upright.  
  
“Shit,” Sarah rasps, “sorry,” but it’s almost like she can’t really see Rachel, like she’s not sure where or who they are.  
  
“Sarah,” she says, and pauses, unsure what to say next. What to do. She settles for a stern, “Sit down before you faint.” Like she’s been waiting for permission, Sarah sinks down onto the road, head in her hands. Rachel follows her down, much more gracefully, and slides Sarah’s bag off her shoulders. “You should eat something,” she says. “I knew you should have eaten more for lunch.”  
  
“No,” Sarah says—more of a sigh. “No, I just—I’m tired, I have a headache. I’ll be fine in a minute.”  
  
She doesn’t look good. Even Rachel can see that. She looks around, wondering what to do. They’re several miles back from the last town they passed, and the median here is small and patchy. She supposes it will do—better than sitting on the road, at least, and she thinks Sarah needs to lie down somewhere.  
  
She unrolls one of the sleeping bags and lays it out on the grass, then goes back across the road and tugs Sarah up by her arms. “Come on,” she says, “leave your bag here, I’ll get it later.”  
  
She leads the other girl to the grass and helps her lie down on top of the sleeping bag. “Just rest for a bit,” she says, unsure how to act, how to be comforting. “You don’t have to get inside, but at least stay on top so you’re not lying in the dirt.”  
  
Sarah closes her eyes, still breathing fast. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice quiet and almost childlike. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean. This.”  
  
Rachel swallows, not sure what to say. Instead of answering, she settles for pulling a bottle of water out of one of their bags and setting it down in the grass near Sarah’s head. “There’s water for you if you get thirsty,” she says, but Sarah’s eyes are still closed and she doesn’t respond other than with a slight nod.  
  
She sits nearby for a while, waiting—for what, she’s not sure—but Sarah doesn’t move or make a sound, and after half an hour or so, Rachel gets to her feet. If they’re going to spend the night here, and she thinks they might have to, she might as well find a better place for them to set up camp. She walks down the highway, looking out for a space that isn’t littered with old trash or rocks. In the end, the only promising thing she sees is a sign telling her that the nearest town is only a kilometer down the road.  
  
She turns around and walks back to Sarah, expecting to find her awake, or at least looking better, but she’s still lying curled up on the sleeping bag, pale and silent. Rachel frowns and kicks at a small rock, sending it skipping out across the road. Sarah flinches at the noise, making a low, pained sound in the back of her throat and lifting an arm like she’s trying to fend somebody off. After a second, she lets it drop limply back to her side.  
  
“Sarah,” Rachel says, voice quiet. “You’re dreaming.” There’s no response, so she reaches out and gives her shoulder a shake. Then she pauses with her hand pressed to the other girl’s arm, feeling the heat of her skin even through her jacket. She slowly moves her hand to Sarah’s forehead, confirming her suspicion. Fever.  
  
She thinks a very rude word. She doesn’t know a lot of things about this new world they’re living in, but she does know that making someone who’s already sick sleep outdoors with winter fast approaching is only apt to make things worse. She thinks about the road sign she saw. If there’s a town, there must be a place to sleep. Can Sarah walk that far if she’s ill?  
  
“Well, you’ll have to,” Rachel murmurs, not feeling entirely kind. She reaches over and gives her another, rougher shake. “Sarah. It’s time to get up.”  
  
Sarah’s eyes open, but slowly. It takes her several seconds to sit up. Rachel keeps talking as she does, keeping her voice firm, with no room for argument. She knows if she gives Sarah the option, she’ll want to stay here tonight, sleep on the median with no cover aside from the sleeping bag. “There’s a town up ahead,” she says, handing Sarah the bottle of water she’d set down earlier and starting to roll up the sleeping bag. “We’re going to walk there and find a place to sleep. Do you think you can walk?”  
  
Sarah rubs at her temple, frowning, still half-asleep. “Yeah. Yeah, I… can.”  
  
“Good.” With the sleeping bag put away, she looks down at their two bags, both heavy with supplies. “I’ll carry both bags.”  
  
“No,” Sarah argues, sounding more awake now. “No, I can carry one, don’t be like that.”  
  
She can’t, though.  
  
They only get five minutes down the road before Sarah is dragging her boots along the asphalt and struggling to stay upright. Wordlessly, Rachel takes the other bag, and when Sarah doesn’t argue, she starts to feel… concerned. Not worried, but definitely concerned. Sarah is barely walking in a straight line, only following the road because it’s a straightaway and because Rachel is next to her. How high is her fever? How did she get this sick without either of them noticing?  
  
Rachel thinks back, trying to pinpoint when this started. This morning? Or the day before, maybe? She can remember Sarah rubbing at her eyes yesterday, like she’d had a headache, but she’d been so _normal_. Eating, walking, talking. Even this morning when they woke up, she’d been fine. Well… not fine. Quiet. But alert. This, the fever and inability to walk, seems to have come on in the space of a couple hours. But they’ve been eating the same food, drinking the same water, sleeping in the same sleeping bag. It doesn’t make sense.  
  
By the time they get off the highway, Rachel is practically dragging her, and Sarah is only half-awake, stumbling on only because Rachel won’t let her stop. They pause while Rachel looks up and down the street, trying to discern which direction will lead them to shelter. She thinks there are more buildings to their right, so she starts walking that way, hoping she’s not wrong.  
  
There’s a hotel up ahead, the building as empty and dark as any they’ve passed this week. She breathes a sigh of relief and eases Sarah down onto the sidewalk.  
  
“Stay here,” she says, as if Sarah is going to spring to her feet and run off.  
  
“Where…”  
  
She pauses, feeling both uncomfortable and pleased at the other girl’s confused, distressed expression. At being _needed_. “I’m finding us a place to stay the night,” she says. “I’ll be back soon.”  
  
She has to use a rock, one of the decorative white ones set up in the hotel’s front garden, to smash open the front door. Once she does that, getting inside is easy. She simply has to reach in through the hole she made and unlock the door, and then she’s in the lobby. She finds room keys stacked behind the desk, each on tiny keyrings that hold both the electronic key cards, which are useless, and tiny metal keys. For when the electricity isn’t working, or the door’s electronic sensor is broken, or a deadly disease has wiped out almost everyone on the planet.  
  
She rummages through the keys until she finds one for a room on the ground floor, and then she goes back outside for Sarah. The short break seems to have woken her up a bit, because she gets to her feet without prompting and follows Rachel inside without too much trouble. Once they get inside the room, Rachel points to the closest bed, a single, and orders, “Lie down.”  
  
Sarah sits on the bed, struggling to pull her jacket off. “’S too hot in here,” she mutters. Rachel rolls her eyes and takes pity on her, pulling the jacket off and flinging it to the floor.  
  
It’s only then, as she’s turning back to face Sarah, that she sees the red line snaking up her arm, from the inside of her elbow all the way up to her shoulder. She swallows, hard, and bends down to get a closer look. She thinks it’s a puncture wound, maybe from an IV, but she can’t tell for sure. It’s too swollen. And anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. She knows what the red line means, and suddenly all of it, from the sudden onset to the severity of the illness, makes sense to her.  
  
“You idiot,” she breathes. “You idiot, what have you done?”  
  
Sarah won’t, or can’t, answer her. She looks down at the other girl, practically unconscious on the bed, and knows she’s alone in this. For the first time in months, she’s completely on her own.  


+++  


Rachel leans up against the brick facade of the hotel building and feels cool air on her face. Her eyes are closed, but she can tell the daylight is fading into a reddish glow and that the breeze, refreshing right now, will start to get cold soon.  
  
She’s considering leaving anyway. It would be so easy to grab her bag and walk away and simply not come back. To keep moving until she reaches a nice place, a place with better weather and with lots of supplies. Such a place exists, surely. If she walks long enough, she’ll find it.  
  
Sarah will probably die, anyway. There probably isn’t a point in sticking around to watch it happen.  
  
She takes a deep breath and starts to walk down the street. She tells herself that Sarah is an idiot, and this is what happens. That if she’d only wrapped her arm up, or said something, she wouldn’t be in this mess, and neither would Rachel. She probably ripped an IV out of her arm on the day they escaped the hospital and forgot all about it, and now look. Just look. Rachel is certainly better off leaving her.  
  
Except Sarah had helped her, before. She’d stayed awake and helped Rachel when she was sick, when the hospital staff had simply left her to live or die. Rachel thinks about it and isn’t sure, if she left now, if she simply abandoned Sarah, if her own self-loathing might become too much to bear.  
  
It’s that, more than any affection for Sarah, that keeps her from running away. She just doesn’t know if she can hate herself that much and still be able to handle keeping up with the supplies she’ll need, with finding shelter, with eating enough, all of it. She thinks that much hatred is bound to lead to a mistake. So she’ll stay, and if (when) Sarah dies, at least she’ll know not to hate herself for it.  
  
There’s a combination pharmacy/general store on the corner. She uses a brick, this time, to break open the front door, and when she reaches in to unlock it, she cuts her hand on a sliver of glass. It bleeds, but it’s not as if anyone is around to see it, so she just ignores the blood and lets herself inside.  
  
Once she’s in, she decides that smashing the front door wasn’t nearly enough for her. She destroys an entire display of laundry detergent, sending plastic bottles crashing to the floor. Then she stomps on the bottles until some of them crack open and leak sickly smelling ooze onto her shoes. She kicks the rest of the bottles off the shelves and heaves for breath, the entire time thinking, _you idiot you idiot you idiot_. Then she steals a candy bar from the display in front of the cash register and eats it, slowly, while she stares out at the mess she’s made.  
  
After a while, she feels a little better. Less like screaming, anyway. She slides down from the countertop and walks to the back of the store, to the pharmacy. She’s half expecting it to be picked clean by people desperate to cure their incurable illness, but it’s not. She walks behind the counter and starts looking for something she can use. Anything.  
  
Several minutes later, she finds a bottle of antibiotics and stares at it, thinking, She’ll die anyway.  
  
Yes. Probably.  
  
But she pockets the bottle and walks back to the hotel like someone marching up to their own execution, fists clenched at her sides, sticky detergent on her shoes.  
  
Sarah half wakes up when she unlocks the door to their room, and Rachel takes a deep breath in through her nose. “Everything,” she says, the lie coming out slick like oil, “is fine.”  


+++  


Everything is not fine.  
  
She forces Sarah to take the pills, every four hours. She even steals a watch to make sure she’s estimating the time correctly. She has no idea if it’s right, the dosage or the timing, but she convinces herself that this has to be better than nothing.  
  
At first she fools herself into thinking what she said wasn’t really a lie—everything will be okay. Sarah is already getting better, staying awake for a few hours after she takes the first dose of antibiotics, and she even talks to Rachel like she’s thinking more or less clearly.  
  
Whenever Rachel’s watch beeps, she hands Sarah a bottle of water and one of the pills from the bottle. “Drink,” she orders, and Sarah does.  
  
“You’re not,” she breathes finally, looking up at Rachel, “very comforting.”  
  
“You’ll have to find another doctor for that, I’m afraid,” she says, and Sarah cracks a smile. Rachel can’t help but return it, albeit hesitantly, before she crosses the room and settles onto the couch.  
  
When her watch beeps four hours later, she wakes up as seamlessly as if no time at all has passed, as if she’s been lying on the couch with her eyes open all this time. But she must have slept, because Sarah is bad again, barely conscious and breathing in rapid, shaky gasps.  
  
After that, there’s no more pretending that things aren’t as bad as she might have thought. Keeping Sarah alive becomes her priority, because there’s nothing else. The schedule she creates swallows up entire days, and if she’s not forcing Sarah to drink water and propping her upright so she doesn’t choke on the pills, she’s _waiting_ for the minutes to click over, for the next time she’ll need to do it. She sits in the dark and listens to Sarah thrash and whimper that she’s sorry, Felix, she’s so sorry for everything.  
  
At some point, on the third day, when Sarah’s fever hasn’t gone down, all Rachel can think about is what she’ll do after Sarah dies. Where she’ll go after Sarah dies. How she’ll be all alone in this building and in this town and possibly on this planet. After Sarah dies. Because maybe Sarah didn’t know what she was talking about when she said there would be other people. Maybe they truly are the only ones.  
  
She grabs Sarah’s face in both her hands and tries to force Sarah to focus on her, to get Sarah’s eyes to meet hers. “You _won’t die_ ,” she says (orders).  
  
And Sarah doesn’t die, but she doesn’t get better, either, and somehow Rachel’s carefully clinical bedside manner gets eroded away as the minutes stretch into hours into days. That evening she finds herself exhausted and curled up on the bed next to Sarah, saying again and again, “Don’t die. Please don’t die.”  
  
She dozes in thirty minute stretches, jerking awake each time in a panic, lifting her head from the pillow convinced that this time, it will be over. Sarah will be dead, and she’ll be alone.  
  
And then she opens her eyes and sees that it’s morning, sunlight making patterns on the floor, and she knows something is wrong, something is _different_. There’s a quiet stillness in the room that she hasn’t experienced in days, and Sarah is lying beside her, eyes closed, skin still hot to the touch, but no longer breathing in those short, shaky gasps. Rachel’s own breath hitches in her chest. She shoots up and kneels next to Sarah in a panic, hands fluttering over her like panicked birds, thinking of brain damage and CPR, thinking, _I told you you wouldn’t die_.  
  
She tilts Sarah’s head back, fingers on either side of her jaw, and leans forward. She breathes into her, trembling and desperate, thinking _Do not leave me here. Do not leave me here alone._  
  
Sarah coughs, gasps in air, tries to push Rachel away with a hand. Her eyes blink half-open, looking up in that blank, unrecognizing stare Rachel’s become accustomed to in the past days. She blinks again, and this time her gaze lands on Rachel’s face and stays there. “The hell?” she croaks.  
  
Rachel sits back on her heels. She swallows, swallows again. “You’re alive,” she manages finally, feeling completely ridiculous and so relieved she could cry.  
  
“Yeah,” Sarah says, and her voice is barely there, her eyes are already closing again. “No shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope none of you are here for accurate post-apocalypse medical procedure. if so... whoops.


	7. you took the first words that they spoke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rachel is into sudoku. did you know that? now you know that.
> 
> ALSO UM this chapter gets kinda nsfw and i'm a dumbass and can't figure out how to bump up the rating??? I'M SORRY

Rachel has learned a lot of things since Sarah Manning became her roommate months before. How to break into buildings. How to light a fire and keep it going through a cold night. How to spend every day with someone she simultaneously wants to kiss and hit in the face, and how to (mostly) keep herself from doing either.  
  
The truest thing she knows, though, is this: anything can happen at any time. Control is a comfort, but it’s also an illusion. It’s a lesson she learned when she was eight years old, when her parents died within hours of each other and she could do nothing to stop it, when she was ripped away from her country and her home and everything she’d ever known without so much as a goodbye. It’s a lesson she’s still trying to understand.  
  
Walking through the dust-covered, foul-smelling aisles of the grocery store at the center of a dead town, she wonders if anyone else would have the same problem giving up control, were they in her situation. Maybe. Maybe not. Then she decides that she doesn’t actually care—everyone else is gone, and they won’t be coming back. She’s allowed to be selfish.  
  
She picks up a tin of sardines and makes a face before adding it to her bag, which is already heavy with dented cans. Then, knowing she’s spent longer than she meant to inside, she makes her way to the front of the store, stepping over broken glass and out into the chilly midmorning air.  
  
Sarah is waiting for her, sitting on the curb with her own bag next to her, this one considerably emptier. “Find anything decent?” she asks as Rachel approaches.  
  
“Some canned chicken,” she says. “And tuna. Oh, and some sardines.”  
  
Sarah pretends to gag, laughing as Rachel rolls her eyes. “You seriously gonna make me eat that shit?”  
  
Rachel drops her eyes to the second bag. “They’re good in protein,” she says, picking it up and adding it to the weight she’s already carrying. When Sarah, still too pale and too thin, doesn’t protest, she knows they’ve been out longer than they should have.  
  
“I’d rather have jerky,” Sarah is saying as she gets to her feet and stretches. “Too bad everyone else decided the same thing before they died.”  
  
“The nerve,” Rachel says dryly. “I think it’s time we went back, don’t you?”  
  
She nods. “This’ll last a while, at least. Even if it’s disgusting.”  
  
They start back to the hotel, slowly, soaking up what little sun they can. Sarah’s steps are already starting to drag, which is a good indication that she’ll need to go back to bed for a few hours when they get to their room.  
  
 _You shouldn’t have come._ The words sit on Rachel’s tongue, but she doesn’t say them out loud. The words are weapons, and she doesn’t want to hurt Sarah. Not today, when they’ve been getting along all morning.  
  
She unlocks the door to their room and sets the bags on the table inside. This room is much bigger than the one they started out in—as soon as Sarah could make the trip, they moved into a suite. One with a king-sized bed, bigger windows, a balcony. One that doesn’t remind Rachel of endless nights spent worrying over (often aggravating, mostly thankless) Sarah. One that doesn’t remind Sarah of, she assumes, being helpless and scared and sick.  
  
Rachel can remember staying in a suite like this, once, with her parents. She was five, maybe six. She remembers swimming in the hotel pool and ordering room service and staying up past her bedtime, watching TV on the big screen from the bed. If she tries, she thinks she can even remember how it felt to be able to do those things—the odd, pleasing sensation of everything seeming relaxed and spontaneous all at once. Of course, this hotel’s pool is murky and far too cold to swim in, and there’s no room service or TV to watch, but if she can somehow recreate the _feeling_ …  
  
“Lunch?” she asks, and Sarah shakes her head, falling back onto the bed and pulling off her ratty leather jacket. She’s not favoring one arm anymore, Rachel notices. The spot on the inside of her elbow has mostly healed, leaving a mark that will fade in time to a small scar. Rachel has one on the back of her hand, a thin, crooked line, to match it.  
  
“Eat something before you fall asleep,” she orders, and sees Sarah roll her eyes.  
  
“Let’s eat later, yeah? I’m not hungry.” She motions for Rachel to come closer.  
  
Rachel means to say no, to force them both to eat, but she goes to Sarah anyway. She climbs onto the bed and reads a book while Sarah falls asleep, her breathing slow and even and comforting. She knows that sooner or later Sarah is going to want to leave, to keep moving, but not today. Today they can forget why they’re where they are. Today they don’t have to worry about what they are, to the world or to each other.  
  
What they will be.  
  


+++  
  


A few days later, she wakes suddenly, confused and worried and not sure why. The other side of the bed is empty, she realizes as she rolls onto her back, squinting in the sunlight. The other side of the bed is empty and the _room_ is empty, too. She sits up, frowning, and looks to her left, to the balcony. She can see it clearly through the glass, the two wire chairs and the tiny, matching table, where people were meant to relax with a drink on summer nights. No Sarah. She climbs out of bed and walks to the front door, looking out into the hall, but sees nothing. Nobody.  
  
She pulls in a deep breath as she slams the door shut, struggling with conflicting feelings of worry and annoyance. Annoyance eventually wins out, because Sarah is fine. Sarah has been getting better every day. She should have said something, but—she’s _fine_. She’ll be fine.  
  
Rachel goes into the bathroom and brushes her teeth. She rinses her face with bottled water. She brushes her hair. After that, when Sarah hasn’t returned, she goes back to bed and waits, pulling a book onto her lap and opening it to a random page somewhere in the middle. She runs her eyes over the words again and again, not taking them in, simply passing the time.  
  
An hour later, she’s starting to consider getting up and looking for Sarah. In fact, she’s climbing out of bed and looking around for her shoes when she hears the key rattling in the lock. A second later, Sarah pushes the door open and walks inside, face flushed from the wind. She’s holding a large, spiral-bound book in her free hand.  
  
“Hey,” she says, nodding to Rachel. “You just get up?”  
  
“No,” Rachel says, “I’ve been awake. I woke up and didn’t know where you’d gone.”  
  
“Yeah, sorry,” Sarah says, not sounding sorry at all as she kicks off first one boot and then the other. “I went back to the bookstore we found the other day, where you got all those weird puzzles and shit?”  
  
“It’s sudoku,” Rachel snaps, “and they’re not weird, they’re logic puzzles.”  
  
Sarah tosses the book onto the table and holds her hands up in an exaggerated gesture of surrender. “Okay, Christ, whatever. Anyway, I saw they had road atlases and shit like that, so I went back today and got one.”  
  
“What?” Rachel says. She’s still fuming about Sarah’s careless attitude and it takes her a second to rip her mind away from it and focus on what she’s actually saying. “Why?”  
  
“Wellll,” Sarah says, drawing out the word in a way that she must know makes Rachel want to slap her, “I thought we should get on the road again before we end up snowed in here. And I know we’ve been stickin’ to the highway, reading the roadsigns, so we don’t really need a map, but I thought…”  
  
Rachel is already shaking her head. No. No, she’s tired of the endless walking, of sleeping outside and waking up with leaves in her hair, of having to hope that the next town they pass will have supplies they can use. Of living like animals instead of people. It’s pointless, ridiculous, and they have a _place_ here. Shelter, food, water, everything they could need. _Here_.  
  
She thinks all of these things, but what she says is, “You’re not well yet.”  
  
Sarah bristles, her shoulders tightening. “I am. I’m fine now.”  
  
“You weren’t fine a few days ago,” Rachel says, “and you’ve still been sleeping—”  
  
Sarah cuts her off with a humorless, brittle laugh. “Yeah, well, what the hell else am I supposed to do here? Sit around and help you do your puzzles, stare at the walls? What?”  
  
“What would you be doing if we were on the road?” Rachel asks, resisting the urge to roll her eyes.  
  
“ _Moving_ ,” Sarah says, like the word is supposed to _mean_ something.  
  
It doesn’t. “No, Sarah.” She crosses her arms. “Here we’ve got shelter, we’ve got food, we’ve got water. We’re much better off staying here, at least until—”  
  
“If you say until I’m better,” Sarah growls, “I’m leaving without you. Seriously, where do you get off tellin’ me what to do?”  
  
“—until the weather gets better,” she finishes, pleased that after everything, she’s still calm, can still stare at Sarah, cold, unfazed by the other girl’s posturing. “Honestly, Sarah, stop being such a child. What do you think we’re going to do, walk all the way down the coast and live on a beach? Drink out of coconut shells?”  
  
Color rises in Sarah’s cheeks, and Rachel snorts. Of course she thought that. Of course.  
  
“What do you care, anyway?” Sarah asks, trying to salvage her pride. “As long as I’m handling things, what do you care where we go, or—”  
  
She smiles. It’s not a nice smile. “Because you handled things so well before, Sarah. You walked yourself almost to death, and now you expect me to follow you while you attempt a repeat performance.”  
  
“That’s not what—” Sarah cuts herself off, unable or unwilling to continue. Her hands are curling into fists.  
  
“I’m not going,” Rachel says. And then, taking a step forward, “I saved your life. You owe me.”  
  
“I don’t owe you _shit_ ,” Sarah says in a low voice.  
  
Rachel raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure of that?”  
  
Sarah glares at her, unafraid. Her mouth works minutely, as if she wants to scream in Rachel’s face. Her hands tighten and unclench again and again, a strangler’s grip, and Rachel wonders for a second if Sarah is going to attack her. But in the end, all Sarah does is take the few remaining steps forward and kiss her. Like their first, it’s clumsy, thoughtless, and too fast.  
  
Rachel pulls back, breathing hard, and says, “Take off your jacket.”  
  
Sarah does, struggling with one of the arms in her hurry. It would almost be funny, if she didn’t follow up by pulling her shirt off and dropping it on the floor at their feet. Rachel swallows, throat suddenly dry, and moves to pull off her own pants. She kicks them away from her, into a pile next to the bed, and for once doesn’t care about the mess they’re both making.  
  
Sarah is undressed from the waist up. Rachel from the waist down. She moves to pull her shirt off, too, but Sarah beats her to it, pulls the fabric up over her head roughly and drops it behind her. Then, crushing her lips against Rachel’s again, she fumbles with her own jeans, unzipping them and letting them slide halfway down her legs. She’s still kicking them off as she pushes Rachel onto the bed and climbs on top of her.  
  
“Sarah—” she starts to say, the name almost a gasp, but Sarah cuts her off with another kiss. Sarah’s lips are on her mouth, on her neck, on her breasts, quick and angry and biting and exactly like she’d imagined. She has one leg pressed between Rachel’s, a delicious friction that repeats itself every time she shifts to kiss another part of her body.  
  
“Sarah,” she says again, reaching to tangle her fingers in the other girl’s hair.  
  
“Shut up,” Sarah murmurs, “just…” and her hand takes the place of the knee between Rachel’s legs, sliding in under the elastic of her underwear. She pauses like that for a second, pressed up against her, and seems almost unsure. Then, taking a deep breath, she slides one finger inside, then two, and suddenly she’s all confidence, like she’s done this a thousand times before, though Rachel knows she hasn’t.  
  
She closes her eyes and thinks that now Sarah will understand, will somehow find the words that Rachel doesn’t know how to say, will somehow divine their meaning when she herself isn’t sure. Sarah moves, slowly at first, then faster, letting Rachel’s breathing show her where to go. When Rachel comes, she looks up and into Sarah’s eyes, which are bright, alive, and still somehow so angry.  
  
She catches her breath while Sarah slows and finally stops, pulling her hand away. She leans down to kiss Rachel on the mouth again.  
  
“There,” she says, pulling back, and slides off the bed before Rachel can even sit up. She collects her clothes from their haphazard piles on the floor with an easy efficiency. “Now we’re even.”  
  


+++  
  


The next day, Sarah is gone.  
  
Worse, it’s like she was never there to begin with. She takes exactly half of their supplies, leaving Rachel’s backpack and sleeping bag and half of the food and water they’ve collected, all still in neat, orderly piles, the way Rachel insisted on arranging them. The only thing Sarah leaves that was hers is the spiral-bound road atlas, which sits propped up against a pile of Rachel’s own books. A final _fuck you_ from Sarah Manning.  
  
She doesn’t cry, or scream, or do much of anything, really. She feels as if someone has come along and cleaved her insides, removed them entirely, leaving nothing but a sense of painful emptiness. Of course, she doesn’t let the strange, awful sensation stop her from reading, which she does for a while in the early afternoon. Or from eating three meals that day, which she does, though the food is tasteless and slimy. Or from trying to figure out some of her more difficult puzzles, which she does until the sun starts to go down and she has to strain her eyes to see the print.  
  
At some point after dark, she forces herself to fall asleep, and she doesn’t dream.  
  
It’s only when she wakes up the following day and Sarah is still gone, still missing like she’d never existed at all, that she realizes exactly what she’s done. The world outside the hotel windows is vast and empty and she’s alone. _Sarah_ has left her alone, and she hates her for it, hates her and wants her so badly it feels like she shouldn’t even be able to move under the weight of it.  
  
Of course, she does move, if only to cross the room and pick up the atlas. She flips through map after map with no idea of how to fix this, only the vague, panicky thought that she _has to_ , somehow. Each page looks the same, every river an identical blue line, every highway an identical red one, all intersecting and crossing each other in what seems, to her, like a meaningless tangle. She turns the pages too fast, almost ripping some, until—  
  
She laughs, leaning her head back against the wall, the book open in her lap. It’s a map of Ontario, and there, in black sharpie, is a circle around the dot that represents the city of Toronto.  
  
Written above it in Sarah’s handwriting is one word: _“DYAD.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND SUDDENLY EVERYONE BECOMES PAINFULLY AWARE OF WHY THIS STORY WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO BE THREE CHAPTERS LONG.
> 
> this is the end for now, but i'm sure i'll come back to this AU someday! thank you to everyone who commented, left kudos, and/or encouraged me! you guys made every day i spent writing this a good day.


End file.
